Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2024 Berlinale, Mati Diop’s Dahomey is a vital work of cinematic imagination. To celebrate the arrival of this prismatic hybrid documentary, the French filmmaker has curated a trio of dazzling shorts that spark a conversation with her spellbinding feature.

You Hide Me (Nii Kwate Owoo, 1970)

“Shot at the British Museum in 1970, You Hide Me is the graduation film of a 26-year-old Ghanaian student. Watching this cinematic manifesto for the first time, I kept wondering how director Nii Kwate Owoo had managed to access the underground reserves of the museum––home to 70,000 African artefacts––knowing how strictly inaccessible they were. I myself would be refused access to those of the Quai Branly for the shooting of Dahomey, fifty years later. In fact, this is the film’s real tour de force: by keeping any negotiation off-screen, the filmmaker offers the spectator a space to speculate on the presence of these two Black bodies, both as real as a mirage. In the end, this cathartic performance acts on our unconscious, inviting us to transgress through the limited yet infinite channels of imagination.”

L’avance (Djiby Kebe, 2024)

“In the history of cinema, some films represent a turning point. For me, L’avance isn’t just a debut short film, but also ground zero for a new generation of Afro-descendants who are only now getting access to fields previously reserved for white people. It was in Paris, where he was born, that Djiby Kebe sketched this twenty-minute, hyper-lucid portrait of a young artist (modelled after himself) in an art world thirsty for young Black blood. A scene that particularly touched me is one in which the artist, Aliou, meets a neighborhood friend shooting a TikTok video, who asks him who he truly is. Aliou says he doesn’t know and that he will be searching for the answer for the rest of his life. L’avance marks the entry of the “Glissantien” anti-hero––named after the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant––into contemporary French cinema."

Atlantiques (Mati Diop, 2009)

“Atlantiques is the first short film that I shot in Dakar. I filmed Serigne, a young man who has just been repatriated from Spain having braved the crossing from the Senegalese coast by boat. For the first time, he shared his epic journey with his two friends (Alpha and Cheikh, my cousin), who were trying hard to convince him to stay. But Serigne was already gone. Whatever the cost, he was determined to jump on a boat again. By the time I had chosen to displace my cinema from Paris to Dakar, an entire generation was escaping the country in the opposite direction (for Europe) by sea, where many of them perished. I understood much later that we were all under a spell that would not say its name.”