A documentary film with fantastic fictional overtones, Dahomey by 41-year-old French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale on February 24. The film of rare density, at only 1 hour and 7 minutes long, was born of a shock: the one felt by Diop when President Emmanuel Macron, visiting Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on November 28, 2017, declared that "African heritage cannot only be in private collections and European museums." Macron declared that "within five years, I want the conditions to be met for temporary or definitive restitution of African heritage in Africa."

Dahomey, which opens the Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, from March 22-31, will be released in cinemas on September 25. The film follows the return of 26 Beninese works from the Musée du Quai-Branly, Paris, to their arrival in Cotonou, Benin, on November 10, 2021. Diop, the niece of Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty (1945-1998), told Le Monde about the making of her interdisciplinary film, its aesthetic strongly connected to postcolonial issues of "restitution."

The idea came in the wake of Emmanuel Macron's speech in 2017, when the French president suddenly announced that all African heritage would have to be returned within five years. The announcement of the return of works of art to Africa was like a kind of slap in the face. The slap in the face was the realization that the question of African heritage, monopolized by European museums, had never come to mind. Or at least it wasn't the first postcolonial issue that came to mind. I was more sensitive to the migration of young Senegalese, a topic to which I have devoted several films.

Despite all the deconstruction work I've been doing since 2008, with my short film Atlantiques [Atlantics, 2010], the medium-length film Mille Soleils [A Thousand Suns, 2013], then the first feature Atlantique [Atlantic, 2019, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival], questioning migration, there was a huge part of the problem I hadn't grasped. And yet, this word "restitution" precisely characterizes my approach as a filmmaker over the last 10 years, by giving, or rather giving back, a voice to migrants.

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