‘I felt this film was my duty’: director Mati Diop on Dahomey, about the return of looted African treasures

What thoughts would go through the mind of a king exiled from his country for more than a century? What if that monarch took the form of a wooden statue boxed up for transportation from France to west Africa? Would he worry about recognising his native land? Perhaps his musings might turn to the abstract: “Within me resonates infinity.” It would be a challenge for any film-maker to choose an inanimate object, however resonant, as her philosophical protagonist and narrator – but French-Senegalese director Mati Diop does just this to powerful effect in her new feature Dahomey.

Part documentary, part visual and sonic poem, Dahomey follows a consignment of historical artefacts as they are returned by the French government to their source in the former African nation of Dahomey, now Benin. This year’s winner of the Berlin film festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear, Dahomey is the latest triumph for Diop, 42, who for a decade and a half has been a much-admired presence in world cinema, first as an actor, then as a director. She made a memorable acting debut in 2008 in Claire Denis’s hypnotic urban reverie 35 Shots of Rum and later became the first Black female director to have a feature in competition in Cannes. That was 2019’s visionary Atlantics, a story of young Senegalese men who attempt the perilous journey to Europe by boat – only to return as ghosts.

Dahomey tells of another return. Here, the journey back to Africa is that of a set of royal treasures – controversially, a mere 26 items among several thousand looted by troops after France’s 1892 invasion of Dahomey. Sitting in the library of a central London hotel, in town to present her film at the BFI London film festival, Diop explains in French that while the restitution of these artefacts began in 2021, she had already been contemplating a fiction feature on the theme for some years.

“It was going to be about an African mask telling its own story, from being captured to the day it comes home – and in between, the experience of exile in Europe. I was about to start writing – then I read that the royal treasures would be returned.”

Diop has talked about Dahomey as “un film d’anticipation” – which in French could mean a science-fiction movie. Indeed, there is something extremely futuristic and techno-conscious about the film, not least in the way that that statue – a “bo”, or power figure, of the Dahomeyan king Ghezo – delivers its voiceover in electronically processed tones.

But Diop also means “anticipation” literally, she says, because she never expected the items’ repatriation to take place in the foreseeable future. “I saw it happening in 2070 or 2080, I couldn’t imagine it earlier – nothing in French or European politics suggested we were ready to recognise colonisation as a crime against humanity.”

Learning that the statues and other artefacts would return to Benin, Diop realised that she needed to get to work fast and film their transportation: “I felt it was my duty.” She was helped by the Senegalese writer and academic Felwine Sarr, co-author of a study on restitution commissioned by the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Sarr helped oil the wheels with the Benin government, Diop says: “They understood that I needed to be with the works all the time in order to tell the story from the statues’ point of view – and they understood that this wasn’t the government’s film. It had to be my film – and they respected that.”

A key section of Dahomey shows a debate that Diop organised among Beninese students, who discuss the significance of the artworks’ return. Their comments cut to the heart of Dahomey’s broader theme – notably when one young woman, a native speaker of the Fon language, says that when she learned about her own culture, it was in French.

“It’s important to hear those words coming from the continent itself,” Diop says. “There’s a limit to how much you can hear the word ‘colonialism’ from academic work – sooner or later, you have to hear it from the people who live with its consequences.”

Diop has known Africa since early childhood. She was born in Paris to a French mother and a Senegalese father – singer-guitarist Wasis Diop, for whom Mati shot an atmospheric music video in 2021. It was her mother who took her on regular visits to Senegal as a child.

“I’m very grateful to her, because otherwise I’d be like many mixed-race people, disconnected from a part of myself. The way things work in France for the descendants of immigrants, everything is organised so that you renounce your double culture. At 25, I had to fight to find the African part of me.”

Diop grew up in Paris’s eastern 12th arrondissement in an area she describes as “not working class, not bourgeois either – très boring”. She now lives in southern Paris’s Chinatown district, studded with high-rises. She made a short there during the Covid pandemic, In My Room; showing Diop alone in her 24th-floor flat, musing on solitude and her late maternal grandmother, and modelling assorted Miu Miu frocks, the work – commissioned by the fashion label – remains one of the most effective films of the lockdown period.

As a teenager, she dreamed of being a singer. “I really wanted to be a star – if you want to sing, you don’t just want to do it in your bedroom.” She went on to work in sound and video production for the stage, but made her breakthrough on screen, acting in 35 Shots of Rum. She plays Joséphine, the daughter of a Paris train driver and a figure rarely represented in cinema: a young Black female intellectual. Diop admits the role closely resembled her, but would have preferred it if Denis had offered her a role more like Béatrice Dalle’s in the director’s blood-steeped art horror Trouble Every Day. “That’s the kind of film I wanted to be in!” she laughs. “Now I’m very proud of playing Joséphine – but back then, I wanted to do the opposite, quelque chose de plus trash!”

You can imagine that Diop could have achieved out-and-out stardom if she had wanted. She cuts a striking figure, her discursive confidence matched with lean beauty and angular elegance: she emphasises her points with expansive hand movements, often keeping one arm clasped round her waist. In fact, she only appeared in a handful of features – mostly on the further fringes of art cinema – before deciding that acting was not for her.

“I realised that it was a predatory world dominated by white men of a certain age and I found that terrifying. I couldn’t articulate it at that age because I didn’t have the intellectual or political tools. Deciding to be behind the camera rather than in front of it was a way of protecting myself – keeping control, not being simply an object of desire.”

Among several shorts that Diop directed was 2013’s A Thousand Suns. Shot in Dakar, it was a celebration of her uncle, the director Djibril Diop Mambéty, who died in 1998 and who enjoys high status in African cinema for his hallucinatory visuals and absurdist sensibility. “I realised it was important for me to start my cinema where he stopped. Perhaps if he had continued to make films, I wouldn’t have become a director. I chose to take on his legacy.”

His work, she says, is “absolutely singular – impossible to imitate”. But some have tried. Mambéty’s best-known film, the 1973 classic Touki Bouki, contains one of African cinema’s most famous images: a young couple on a motorbike, handlebars embellished with a horned cattle skull. When that was pastiched by Beyoncé and Jay-Z to promote their 2018 On the Run II tour, Diop declared herself sceptical, with a sharp comment on “the unbearable lightness of the mainstream”.

Related: France should return much more looted African art, film-maker says

“Did I say that?” she says when I remind her. “The mainstream is completely part of my culture, I’m more anti-elitist – I hate any hierarchy between high culture and popular culture, that’s very French.” But, she says: “I was amazed how casually Beyoncé appropriated [the image] – that’s so American, so dominating. If she’d had the decency to mention the name of the film, a million people could have discovered it. I still like listening to her music, though.”

Diop’s current plans are very much focused on Africa: she has set up a production company in Dakar, with a view to working with young African film-makers. As for French society now, and what current political tendencies might mean for future, more extensive returns of African treasures, Diop remains wary.

“The choice that Europe seems to be making is a drift towards fascism. Maybe the left will reinvent itself in reaction to that. And maybe then, the discussion about restitution will be taken up again and in 2070 we’ll be living in a different world.”

• Dahomey is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 25 October