The Musee du Quai Branly is a long ark-like building perched above a garden, its foliage blocking it from the busy boulevard of the same name on the banks of the Seine. Literally in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, this museum houses more than 300,000 works of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, much of it a legacy of the French colonial empire. Its opening in 2006 was touted as an enlightening break from the practice of exhibiting non-European works as anthropological specimens. The building’s architect, Jean Nouvel, envisioned the building as a place of spiritual rebirth, a place where Western curatorial institutions “disappear before the sacred objects so that we can commune with them.” He said that it is a place where people can do things. However, the atmosphere inside is more eerie than enchanting. The cavernous main gallery is a maze of shadows and faux earthen walls, with masks peeking out between oversized photographs of tropical plants. “You’ll never get used to this space,” Mati Diop said when we visited last month. “It’s like ‘The Matrix.'”
Diop, a French-Senegalese filmmaker who achieved international fame with his debut feature Atlantics, describes the museum’s “mise-en-scène” as depressing and manipulative, and while switching to speaking fluent English, says: He seemed instinctively agitated by this museum. It’s a mess. ” Everything was wrong, she insisted, from the folkloric disdain of the earth-colored walls to the racks of musical instruments packed tightly together in a visible storeroom that reminded her of bodies in a morgue. The most troublesome were the grim-faced guards, almost all of them older black men. “Psychologically, what does it do to a person to spend all day in a space where the violent background of colonialism has completely disappeared?” Diop asked. “Yet it’s everywhere,” she said, pointing to a man from the Kingdom of Dahomey (now southern Benin) wearing a dark suit next to a multicolored beaded crown. “The presence of these people and the presence of this heritage in museums are part of the same story,” she continued. “I’m feeling dizzy.”
Her new film, a fantastical documentary entitled Dahomey, seeks the return of the so-called Dahomey treasure, including 26 of the many works of art seized by French troops when they conquered the kingdom in the 1890s. It is recorded. (Newspapers of the time raved that the conquered natives, whose “painted gods” could not protect them, “could not have missed the forest.”) The Dahomean sculptures are on display at the Museum of Anthropology. There he was admired by Picasso and Apollinaire. But in 2018, decades of diplomacy and activism culminated in President Emmanuel Macron’s historic decision to repatriate the artwork to Benin. Diop’s film follows them from Rue Branly to their hero’s welcome in the country’s largest city, Cotonou, where students from local universities discuss them after an exhibition at the presidential palace. are. “I cried for 15 minutes,” one student said after watching the show. Another declares, “What was plundered over a century ago is our souls.”
A troubling question hangs over the joyful return home. What does it mean for a work of art to “return” to a country that did not exist when it was removed? Can they have any meaning to people alienated from their history, or are they in danger of becoming mere instruments of state propaganda? And what about the countless stolen items that Western museums have not returned? In Diop’s otherworldly conceit, these anxieties are voiced by “26.” It is a defiant statue of King Gezo of Dahomea, who speaks for his treasure with an unfathomable roar. (This is one of a trio of royal bochos, or powerful figures, depicting Dahomean monarchs, attributed to artists Sossa Dede and Bokossa Dombide.) 26 frets in Fon, the language of the kingdom. , feeling something like survivor’s guilt, wondering why he had been chosen to “return to the surface of time.”
We asked the guard where the treasure had been displayed before it was removed from the museum. Diop was filming there, but couldn’t find a place to set up his camera. She had only two weeks to prepare from the time it was announced that the work would be removed until she headed to Benin. “It was like a special forces operation,” she recalls. Branley Street denied her request for access until Benin authorities, who wanted to preserve a record of the extradition for posterity, mediated on her behalf. Now, she’s back at the scene of a cinematic heist, donning the familiar mask from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s “Statues Die,” a film essay about looted art that France banned after its release in 1953. I gasped when I saw it. “It’s her,” she says, pulling her phone out of her blue Telfar purse to take a photo. “She’s so beautiful. She’s so beautiful.”
Diop, 42, is a petite, calm woman with delicate features and a calm, alert look. Unfortunately, she is often thought of as “cute,” with her wavy, center-parted hair and a beautiful mark on one corner of her feathery eyebrows. It had the eyes of a doe that jumped. She can be almost aggressively modest. At one point, when another museum visitor inadvertently entered her personal space, she responded with a silent picket. But when she talks about her work, it’s full of enthusiasm that drives her to go out. Sometimes she gestured so emphatically that she touched my shoulder without realizing it. “You need to have a sensual, physical relationship with the idea,” Diop says. “It’s difficult to create something without having the idea of transmitting information at the same time.”
“Dahomey” is coming to American theaters after receiving critical acclaim in Europe. (It will then be available to watch on the streaming platform mubi.) In February this year, it won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale following Germany’s decision to transfer ownership of Benin Bronze to Nigeria. Its premiere in France last month reignited a moribund national debate over the issue, making Diop a regular on radio and television, and appearing on the cover of the left-wing daily Libération on Wednesday. “She is already having an effect,” said Ferouinne Sarle, a Senegalese intellectual and co-author of the 2018 Sarle-Savoy report that guided France’s return of cultural heritage to African countries. told me. “This question was framed from the perspective of a Western debate: “Are there museums?” Can objects be taken care of? Are we going to empty Western museums? ” Now, with this film, we are hearing the voices of those who should be our main concern. ”
“Originally, I intended to write a fictional epic, depicting the entire journey from the moment of the looting, imagining the future, to the moment when the work of art is recovered,” says Diop. He explained that he first became involved in the documentary after reading that the treasure was about to be returned. Prior to its release in France, the film also premiered in Benin and Senegal, where Diop recently founded a production company, playfully named Fanta Sea. (Fanta and Si are common Senegalese names.) Recovery has become synonymous with her work in empowering African youth creatively. As she told me, “We wanted to make a film that would bring back the desire for ourselves.”
The filmmaker’s enthusiasm, if at times smug, is inspiring. Who else speaks, as she did at a recent press conference, of reparations as an “irresistible march” that promises to shake up the very “imagined order”? However, Diop’s research justifies such a self-evident statement. Her work is a yearning nocturnal film of ambiguous adventures and impossible returns, moving between the intimate solitude of statues and former actors and broader issues such as decolonization and the immigration crisis. She produced “Dahomey” after taking over multi-million dollar projects in Hollywood. When she said she became a film director because it was for her “the only possible path to liberation,” it was hard to doubt it.
There was applause on Lyon’s Rue des 1er Films when Diop tore away a red cloth from the “Filmmaker’s Wall” to reveal a plaque with her name engraved on it. A small group of people were taking photos. Thierry Frémaux, who runs the Cannes Film Festival and the Lumière Institute, where the impromptu ceremony took place last month, gently embraced her. Soon, dozens of students, many of them black or brown, gathered around Diop under a streetlight. A young woman with oversized glasses invited her to film school. Another woman, wearing a kaffiyeh and fingerless gloves, asked the filmmaker to autograph her “Atlantic” DVD.
Diop’s debut novel is a gothic romance, a political allegory about labor and immigration, and an homage to Dakar, Senegal. A group of young people helping build a luxury tower are robbed and decide to seek a better life in Spain. Like thousands of others, they die at sea. But then, improbably, they return possessing the body of the young woman they left behind. Unexplained fires and fevers attack the city. At the westernmost tip of the African continent, Dakar is depicted as a sprawling stretch of dusty highways and ghostly beaches fringed by the dark expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. In one of the final scenes, the boys force their boss to dig a grave for them in a seaside cemetery. “Every time you look at the top of the tower, you will remember our unburied bodies at the bottom of the ocean,” says one person.
Diop cast non-professional actors from all over Dakar. Amadou Mbouu walked past her at 2 a.m. as she was clubbing in the chic Almadies neighborhood. “I believe in destiny,” he told me. Despite never thinking of becoming an actor and fearing a religious backlash against sex scenes, he ended up starring as a young detective, starring his co-star Mama Sané, who doesn’t speak French. I also acted as an interpreter. The film was shot in Wolof, Senegal’s lingua franca, which Diop himself had difficulty understanding. But her determination was a language unto itself. “If she had to do that scene 50 times, we did that scene 50 times,” Mbou said, recalling instructions to “exhaust yourself within an inch” during an interrogation scene. spoke. The filming lasted all day. “For Matty, there was no such thing as ‘timing,’ he just looked until he found it.”
Atlantics premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, making Diop the first black woman to participate as a director. Her invitation was shocking. The film was not only a debut feature, but also a genre fantasy with non-professional actors delivering lines in an African language. Still, we won the Grand Prix. (The film was later picked up by Netflix, breaking the language barrier of the diaspora and joining a renaissance of black cinema in the United States.) Diop had previously starred in Claire Denis’ intimate father-daughter drama “35 Shots of Shots.” He was best known for starring in “Rum” (2008), but his triumph was “The LSD Experience.” The giddiness was evident in her acceptance speech. Four minutes into the show, and the solemn expression of gratitude still not over, Diop was escorted off stage by Sylvester Stallone to the sounds of Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium.” Crossed.
“Now you can hibernate whenever you want.”
Cartoon by Seth Fleischman
“I was impressed by this woman. She was so young, so pretty, she looked so fragile, but so strong, and her conversation was so accurate,” Fremaux recalled over drinks. . We were in the lab’s cafe, just across the street from the hangar where some of the world’s first films were made. The menu specializes in wines made by filmmakers. There was also Francis Ford Kopolous. There was a “Senegalese essence” in “Atlantiques” that transcended Diop’s mixed-race origins, Frémaux continued, calling the filmmaker “a pure artist, a pure poet, and a great statesman.” It is also,” he characterized. In 2022, she directed and narrated a campaign ad for the left-wing party La France Insoumise. Zooming in on the faces of movie theaters, the Lumière brothers celebrate the diversity of the country where cinema was invented. “No matter the genre or color, we laugh, we think, and we cry,” Diop says in unison.