The unearthly message arrives in strangled Fon, one of the major Indigenous languages of Benin, formerly Dahomey, where it was ‘officially’ supplanted by French amid nearly a century of colonisation.

By Elian Peltier Reporting from Abomey and Cotonou, Benin. Throughout the movie “Dahomey,” the eerie voice of a 19th century West African king emerges from the depths of history.

But this remains a lucid piece of work that lays out its arguments in sharp fashion. Dahomey deals with the gestural return of 26 historically significant objects – out of many thousands – to ...

Dahomey is only 68 minutes long, but in that stretch of time, it crosses continents, considers the ongoing effects of colonialism from multiple angles, and moves from the metaphysical to the mundane.

The Kingdom of Dahomey’s fierce war against French colonisation was lost in 1892, when thousands of treasures were looted and shipped back to Paris. It’s part of modern Benin, where Macron ...

The thorny issue of cultural restitution is brought vividly to life in this documentary with a twist. It charts the repatriation in 2021 of 26 royal artefacts originally swiped from the Kingdom of ...

There are many voices in Mati Diop’s new documentary, “Dahomey” (in theaters), and one of them belongs to Artifact No. 26. “I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls ...

Winner of the prestigious Golden Bear prize at this year’s Berlinale, French auteur Mati Diop’s sophomore feature, Dahomey, is a film that invites questioning. Following the repatriation of 26 ...

In 1892, French soldiers looted a number of totems and treasures from the West African kingdom of Dahomey, considering these items the spoils of victory after winning the Second Franco-Dahomean War.

Disorientation awaits in the brilliant, bracing documentary Dahomey. In a world of endless running times, the film says what it wants in little more than an hour, mostly with calm, functional ...