Dahomey director Mati Diop: ‘I felt I had the responsibility to make sure a new wave of African cinema exists’

Mati Diop, now in her early 40s, has been making films for 20 years, but the French-Senegalese polymath properly landed with the cinemagoing public at Cannes in 2019. Atlantics, an unclassifiable drama set in Dakar, took the Grand Prix – essentially the second prize – and established her as a force in the industry.
If a further imprimatur was required, it came when Dahomey – a breathtakingly imaginative documentary hybrid – took the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin film festival. The top prize at that distinguished event has previously gone the way of legends such as Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Altman.
“I felt the film pretty much aligned with our present times,” Diop says. “Because I think the award, for me, was not only, from the jury, a consideration of my work as a director but also a sign of political urgency.”
Dahomey concerns the return of 26 – out of 7,000 – artefacts from the Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris, to Benin (much of which was formerly the kingdom of Dahomey). The film gives dialogue, spoken by the Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, to a statue that represents Ghézo, 19th-century ruler of the kingdom. It also features fascinating conversations between students at the University of Abomey-Calavi about the ethics and potential of the limited repatriation project.
The award arrived during a particularly charged Berlinale. The mayor of Berlin denounced Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, Israeli and Palestinian film-makers, for, when accepting the best-documentary prize, speaking of their “people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza”. Claudia Roth, the German culture minister, claimed the speeches were “characterised by a deep hatred of Israel”. There was a lot of tension at the event.
“I feel that all the themes, not only the restitution but the stigmas of colonisation in our present times, in the African continent and in Europe, resonate very much with what we were going through during the festival,” she says.
“There was a huge pressure on the liberty of speech towards Palestine support. It was a very, very heavy situation during the festival. Voilà! If you dare to support these people your speech will be immediately instrumentalised. The film is also about a break in the silence about colonial subjects.”
Diop arrives at the interview with a translator but turns to her only once, and then for just one word. Indeed, the flow of language is unstoppable. She could talk (in English) for her country. Diop has a distinguished heritage. Her father is the Senegalese musician Wasis Diop. Her paternal uncle was Djibril Diop Mambéty, director of the seminal feature film Touki Bouki. Presented at Cannes in 1973, the road movie has, over the decades, become established as a classic of African cinema.
“Even being the niece of such a strong political and artistic figure, even having grown in a very visionary African family, that doesn’t protect you from the western cultural hegemony,” Diop says with a wry laugh. “You’re still going to be smashed. You’re still going to feel that African voices count less.
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“Growing up in Paris, being the niece of Djibril Diop Mambéty and the daughter of a great African musician made me feel that my African culture was not considered, because nobody knew who they were. It is like being the daughter of and niece of African princes – but in France nobody knows who they are. Right?”
Diop took a degree at Le Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Art and then became a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. A busy actor, she has appeared in 35 Shots of Rum and Both Sides of the Blade for the great Claire Denis. Atlantics first turned up as a short in 2009. Both that version and the later feature are about Senegalese women contemplating emigration by sea from their home country. The films have a singular, ghostly unreality. Diop credits her decision to shoot in Senegal to her dissociation from her heritage.
“This was actually the reason why I decided to engage my cinema in Senegal, in Dakar,” she says. “Because, at some point, as a French-Senegalese woman and film-maker, I had two choices. I completely could have considered myself as a French director who makes films in France. That would have been a possibility. It’s still a possibility, but I felt that I had the responsibility to maybe embody a generation that makes sure that a new wave of African cinema exists.”
Dahomey had a strange evolution. Diop had, for some time, been considering a feature about an African mask that tells its own story. When she learned of the French plan to return a certain amount of Beninese art, that fantastic notion fused with intriguing reality. It makes for a surprisingly seamless diversion. The statue, speaking from the darkness of its crate, merges its concerns with those of the impressively engaged students.
“That’s right. I had this feature idea of having an African mask talk about his own story – the story of his rapture, the story of his being stolen from his native land, of his exile for more than a century and then of his repatriation,” she says.
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“Then, in real life, I heard that 26 treasures from Dahomey were about to be repatriated. The fiction I had in mind impacted the documentary. It was actually a really, really interesting process, because I had to adapt to documentary conditions for all the actual repatriation. But I still was able to protect my feature, my fiction, within that documentary process.”
The students, repeating arguments made earlier to the director, come up with angles we may not anticipate. They note that, deprived of native tongue, they are forced to make their anti-colonialist arguments in French. Why are the statues now in a Beninese museum? Isn’t that a western concept? I wonder if any of the statements surprised the film-maker. Were there angles she had not anticipated?
“I don’t think there was surprise,” she says. “I think I felt very much mirroring them. Because I felt, growing up in France as a French-Senegalese child and then teenager and then young woman, the stigmas of colonisation, the denial around it, the way slavery was not really taught in school. My parents didn’t really talk about it the way you should be telling the story to a child. So even though I grew up in France, which is a past colonial empire, and which is still very neocolonial, I think that somehow the circumstances are similar to what they are saying in the debate.”
I can see that. The students note that they have been unable to grow up near all these artefacts from their history. Even in Africa, the past has been stripped from them.
“They were not really introduced to their African story,” she agrees. “Which was also my case – that the African story was minimised. They were mostly invaded by the western hegemony culture. So I think that this weight of being smashed by the western culture is something I went through. In a very different way, obviously, but I think I felt that mirror relationship to them.”
Diop is proud to find herself in an unclassifiable category. Atlantics was a drama, but it had the slow muddle of real life. Dahomey certainly works as documentary. We see the boxes of artefacts being loaded on to aeroplanes. We meet them as they arrive home. But the eerie, electronically distorted voice of Makenzy Orcel invests the film with an otherworldliness. There is something like a distinctive aesthetic here – a calm watchfulness – but it feels as if we’re observing a talent that could fly off in a hundred different directions.
“I think it’s really strange to be putting films in boxes,” Diop says, laughing. “I’m still considered as a young film-maker, but I began 15 years ago. So I think that, at some point, you don’t know any more if you are choosing the films or if the films are choosing you. I feel the more precise you are in your language, the more films come to you in a very organic way.”
She talks about the hours and years spent in front of a computer when writing a fiction film. I sense she wants to get out there and make films among life.
“I think I’m really interested by process,” Diop says. “I like it better when I feel in dialogue with the real. You know?”
Dahomey is in cinemas now