Critics reviews

“Dahomey” strikes the perfect balance between reflecting on the past and embracing the future with dream-like direction and a perspective like no other.

Diop balances the regal, old-world, quasi-divine perspective of the spirit with a sober, interrogative depiction of the modern spaces and procedures that store and transmit these once-sacrosanct artifacts.

At just over an hour, Diop’s strange, captivating and rigorously intellectual film leaves a mighty impression well beyond its compact length.

In Diop’s hands, what might have unfolded as a mere chronicle of a journey morphs into something far more electrifying and disturbing... [Dahomey] wonders what remains of our identities when the things those cling onto suddenly disappear––then resurface from oblivion. To this, Diop offers no clear answers. But in the heart-shaking passion of that university debate, in those students’ resolute commitment to reappropriate their own narratives, she finds something rarer still: a snapshot of a generation for whom this isn’t just the story of a restitution. It’s a resurrection.

It is an invigorating and enlivening film, with obvious implications for the Elgin/Parthenon marbles in the British Museum.

In this bewitching work of speculative documentary, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop takes on a hot topic of the culture wars – the decolonisation of European museums – and weaves from it a beguiling meditation on identity, ancestry and the weight of history.

[S]oundtracked by a ruminative dreamlike score, it fills and nourishes the viewer with urgent desires, providing space for the light that constitutes the souls of Black folk to shine brighter through repair. Diop is back, and she is just as searing and imperative as ever.

One of the richest films to premiere at this year’s Berlinale...

Dahomey is an excellent point of entry in an ongoing conversation.

Extraordinary and lightly eccentric... [Dahomey] avoids polemic and instead presents itself as informed and inquisitive blueprint for the ways in which we discuss anti-colonialist action.

Open-ended, fecund with imagination and ideas, never hectoring or lecturing, not so much posing questions as asking what questions might be posed: Mati Diop’s film is a marvelous provocation.

Some may wonder about Diop’s choice to follow an international breakout that picked up a string of awards, starting with the Grand Prix in Cannes, with a 68-minute documentary. But they won’t be wondering after seeing this beautifully made, powerful and thematically complex work.