To maintain historical and cultural superiority, Western empires silence the atrocious means (plunder, conquest, and genocide) by which they pillaged treasures. These stolen items—from Asante gold regalia to the Benin bronzes—once served specific cultural functions. Now, they decorate museum interiors, heralded as cultural preservation or embraced as a “pathway to racial and [colonial] healing, repatriation and reconciliation.” 

While cinema has played a vital role in pacifying historical rampages, further stabilizing the stories of empire within the historical record, it has also been an antidote. Artists like Alain Kassanda and Onyeka Igwe have used film to excavate Black counter-histories and challenge dominant regimes of visual representation that silence the traumas of the colonial past. They belong to a contemporary diasporic wave of Black anticolonial cultural producers and experimental filmmakers who tend to “revolutionary memory work,” a crucial tenet in both continental African and Afro-diasporic filmmaking. 

The Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop is another steward of this practice. She appropriates cinema to find where the past meets the present, rupturing the colonial monopoly on Black and Afro-diasporic histories and representation. Nowhere is that modus operandi more explicit than in Dahomey, her unconventional second feature which won the top prize at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, has been shortlisted for a 2025 Oscar, and is now available to stream in the United States. The film depicts the return of 26 looted artifacts from France to Benin in 2021 and is narrated by an anthropomorphized royal sculpture of King Ghezo, to which Diop gives an eerie, distorted imagined voice. Through the narrative, written by Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, the statue comes to life. “There are thousands of us in this night,” Ghezo, speaking in the Indigenous Beninese language Fon, says at the beginning of the film. “We all bear the same scars. Uprooted. Ripped out. The spoils of massive plundering.”

In Dahomey, as in her other work, Diop contests the archives’ accumulated erasures, projections, fabulations, and misnamings—enlivening silenced histories and centering the forgotten victims of historical violence. “Early on in my filmmaking career, I felt a sense of urgency to fight against the colonial, hegemonic gaze by putting [marginal] subjects at the center of their own stories,” Diop said in a recent interview with me. The director’s experimentation across genre, form, and sound engenders a new filmic language that is hauntological, which the scholar Christina Sharpe in In the Wake defines as “a work of haunting, where the specters of the undead make themselves present.” By incorporating African oral storytelling traditions, supernatural elements, and Afro-surrealist aesthetics into her cinematic language, Diop blurs the lines between speculative and nonfiction. 

This hauntological and Afro-surrealist approach underpins her experimental short documentary Atlantiques (2009), and debut feature, Atlantics (2019), both of which begin and end with Senegalese youth journeying from Dakar, Senegal, to Spain. Atlantiques recounts the story of Serigne Seck, a young man whose failed voyage speaks to a greater epidemic of, in Diop’s words, “a ghost generation.” Atlantics dramatizes this fraught position between life and death by focusing on how the absences of these young men spiritually and physically haunt the women they leave behind. 

Both films attend to the ongoing neocolonial issues of labor exploitation and corrupt governance in Senegal, which has resulted in a lack of opportunities for young people and enabled their transmigration to Europe. These earlier works also oppose Western media and televisual depictions of the crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea. Much of disaster reporting on the plight of refugees rely on scenes of shipwreck desperation, suffering, and even rescue to minimize the role of modern colonialism and contemporary European border policing as major culprits. 

The “colonial archetypes” that permeated coverage of Black migrants propelled Diop to create a liberated and “new cinematic language.” In Atlantiques, the director invites us to listen to Seck’s experiences and motives for embarking on a fatal journey to Europe rather than indulge in gruesome details of his death. In Atlantics, Diop uses spectrality to animate the effects of centuries of Western imperialism and colonization experienced by African youth. Ada and Souleliman are a young couple whose tragic love story ignites a series of supernatural happenings. While attempting to emigrate to Spain, Souleliman (along with other men) abruptly drowns at sea. The young men “return” as ghosts, inhabiting the bodies of their girlfriends every night. At the behest of the spirits, the women haunt the young men’s former bosses, whose exploitative practices provoked their passage overseas. Diop’s use of hypnotic soundscapes by Fatima Al Qadiri—lush dark backgrounds engulfed in beach mist, and vast aquatic imagery—enhances Atlantics’ eerie, dreamlike melancholia. 

As Diop details in our interview, part of her cinematic motivations can be attributed to her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty. The Touki Bouki director approached filmmaking with a kind of “radical inventiveness through form,” Diop said. She wanted to extend that into the present through her own reinvention. Mambéty experimented across genres to produce visually striking agitprop that exposed the issues plaguing post-independence Senegal, such as the realities of neocolonialism, globalized capitalism, and postcolonial malaise. Similarly, Diop melds genres (horror, fantasy, romantic tragedy, and police crime drama) in Atlantics to advance her haunting narrative and pushes formal boundaries in Atlantiques to create a visually textured, multisensory spectral narrative enlivened by the central phantom. 

In Dahomey, Diop moves from ghostly possession to resurrection. The director grants the Beninese artworks autonomy in light of their centuries-long dispossession and removes France from the center of restitution debates. In our interview, Diop described this current conversational configuration, which includes Beninese President Patrice Talon as a kind of manipulation. “This restitution from the French perspective, [on the surface] looks as if France is reaching some sort of new age [post-colonial] relationship with Africa, which is unfortunately false,” she said. 

Working with cinematographer Josephine Drouin Viallard, Diop charts the “return” of these 26 artifacts, from their packaging into boxes at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris to their re-captivity at the Beninese presidential palace in Cotonou. Throughout this journey, Dahomey centers their speculative interior lives and thoughts. “I have in my mouth an aftertaste of the ocean,” Ghezo says at one point. “I’m torn between the fear of not being recognized by anyone and not recognizing anything.” 

To consider the statue’s anxiety, Diop observes how the Beninese people engage with the homecoming of these treasures. But she rarely focuses on the elite or diplomatic response. Instead, Diop directs the lens at the general, ostensibly more working-class population. From the young men who become enamored by the returned treasures while setting them up in glass cages to the Beninese curator singing quietly to a returned sculpture, the camera lingers on the subtle moments of appreciation, curiosity, and connection. As visitors arrive at the palace, special attention is paid to the intergenerational attendees in their traditional Beninese dress. Dahomey documents and centers the historical moment around their gatherings, watching as patrons attentively listen to the museum guide as he explains the historical context in which the returned objects lived and the conditions of their dispossession.

Diop does not, in her own words, “let two presidents, French and African, take hostage of this historical moment.” The opening-night ceremony leads into a fervent debate between Beninese youth, which becomes the focal point of Dahomey. A prolonged sequence of students at the University of Abomey-Calavi consumes the latter half of the film. They collectively interrogate the restitution and exhibition of these artifacts in relation to their own cultural heritage and identities. As the debate (organized and staged by Diop) continues, the students’ voices permeate the space, and the camera pans to folk outside listening via radios in a courtyard and their cars. The moment nods to the staged IMF/World Bank vs. The People trial in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006). One student describes being completely “unaware” that these sculptures were held abroad, and another describes crying for 15 minutes after seeing the treasures for the first time. 

The French colonization of the Kingdom of Dahomey between 1892 and 1894 was a direct consequence of the Berlin Conference, in which colonial entities partitioned Africa for their rule. As Fazil Moradi examines in “Catastrophic Art,” “The carving up of the African continent into colonies produced France, Britain, Belgium, and Germany as empires—and the imaginary ‘West’ was created as a purified body with no trace of African or any other’s touch.” The emergence of cinema not only coincided with the Berlin Conference, but it also helped materialize these colonial and white supremacist structures. The visualization of territorial and economic imperialism through the emergence of visual technologies in the late 1880s imagined film to be an integral part of the colonizing process. Cinematic technologies and the advent of nonfiction and ethnographic cinema helped shape and execute Europe’s imperial fantasies across the continent. 

By blurring the lines between speculative and nonfiction, Dahomey’s visual aesthetic becomes hauntingly trance-like. Wally Badarou and Dean Blunt’s ghostly musical score, heavy with tidal synths and ethereal hums, helps ensnare audiences. In the film’s opening scene, the camera is fixed on the imagery of the treasures incarcerated in glass fixtures at the Musée du quai Branly, functionally an extension of France’s colonial project. In Benin, lush and vibrant landscapes fill the screen, only to be disrupted by the specters (returned treasures) contemplating their exilic experiences, new surroundings, and cages. The colonial tradition of cultural preservation aimed to exploit Indigenous African cultural production for non-African audiences, and these unsettled histories of cultural epistemicide are obscured by “restitution.” Diop’s phantasmic cinematography underscores the spectacle of “return” as France remains unwilling to fully contend with the toll of its annihilatory violence on its former colonies. Because the terms of restitution in the African context aren’t in the hands of the people, it becomes an instrument in political “peacemaking” backroom dealings that further enshrine Franco-African relations. 

The narration of the anthropomorphized treasures and the “restitution” debate among the students provide a launching pad for a greater discussion around African self-determination in the fight for true decolonization. In a similar vein, Franco-Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror’s 1976 short film Et les chiens se taisaient, a great work of cultural decolonization adapted from the play of the same name by Martiquinian poet and scholar Aimé Césaire, takes place in the reserves of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The short follows the “rebel” character (played by Gabriel Glissant) who works in the museum’s storage area as he gives a group of young Black children a rage-induced educational tour of the archives filled with unseen looted African artifacts. Both Maldoror’s short film and Dahomey subvert the museum scenography to create a space for youth to be active participants in their history and futures. “I can’t see how the youth cannot be put in the center,” Diop reiterates in our interview. “They are the ones who have been dispossessed by the physical traces of their history.”

While we don’t see the children speak in Et les chiens se taisaient, Dahomey completely turns her lens onto the students as they sharply voice some of the colonial and neoliberal entanglements embedded within these restitutive gestures. “Restituting 26 out of 7,000 is an insult,” says one student. As the debate rages on, another student recounts being estranged from their Indigenous African language, and forced to speak the “colonizers” language because Fon, Nago, and others are not part of the Beninese educational system. This leads to discussions highlighting the continued abandonment of African knowledge systems and philosophies. Toward the end of the conversation, one student brings up workers’ purchasing power and another declares, “We need a revolution.” This dialogue of restitution connects the specters of the past to the young people advancing the fight against global capitalism and neocolonialism in the present. With Dahomey, Diop ultimately charts a shift in consciousness that lends itself to a revolutionary storm brewing across the African continent, led by the younger generations.