November 2021. 26 art treasures from the former Kingdom of Dahomey have spent 129 years in a Paris museum. Now the art that was stolen in colonial times is returning to today’s Benin. But 26 objects are only a fraction of what can still be seen in museums in the Western world. And how should the people in Benin deal with the objects?
The confrontation with the colonial legacy of the West was worth the Golden Bear for the jury of the 74th Berlinale, chaired by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o. The 41-year-old Mati Diop was combative at the award ceremony: “We can see the past as a burden or as a basis for moving forward. We refuse to accept historical oblivion.” The creation of the film was a stroke of luck, said the director, camerawoman and actress in an interview with the Kleine Zeitung. “I had the idea of depicting the journey of a mask from colonial plunder to return. When I heard in 2017 that Macron wanted to return these artifacts, I was skeptical that it would actually happen.”
Diop has established himself as an important voice of an Afro-diasporic culture. Born in Paris in 1982 as the daughter of a Senegalese father and a French mother, she spent a long time searching for her identity as a child of two cultures. Only liberation from Western cultural dominance allowed her to “let my Africanness breathe.”
Berlinale awards ceremony
Diop uses her cinema to question Eurocentric representations. In her 2019 feature film “Atlantique,” which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, she portrays workers in Dakar who want to escape across the sea to a better future.
She has been working on restitution as a topic for 20 years. “I was 20 years old when Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman’s skeleton was returned to South Africa. The media reported on it, but they didn’t want to cause a stir.” But there has now been a change. “Thanks to a new generation, these questions are being understood by more and more people.” Your film is intended to make a contribution here. “The cinema should be an echo of our present and thus create an archive of African history.”
2024-02-25 11:11:57
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