Film Screening & Panel Discussion: Dahomey by Mati Diop

November 2021. 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artefacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what’s the attitude to adopt in response to these ancestors’ homecoming, in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? The debate rages among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi.

Join us for a screening of French filmmaker Mati Diop’s 2024 documentary *Dahomey,* dramatised account of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey (in modern-day Benin) that were returned from France to Benin, and the reactions of Beninese people.

Following the screening, we’ll host a conversation on contemporary approaches to repatriation of cultural heritage with Foreman Bandam, Field Museum Assistant Curator in African Anthropology, and Christopher Philipp, the Field’s African Ethnography Collection Manager.

The evening will conclude with a social reception featuring complimentary refreshments.

Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Program starts at 6:30 p.m. Please enter via 54 W Chicago Ave. Non-alcoholic options will be available.

About the Film

Dahomey had its world premiere at the main competition of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear. It was released theatrically in France on September 11, 2024, by Les Films du Losange, to critical acclaim. It was named one of the Top 5 Documentary Films of 2024 by the National Board of Review.

Dahomey was also selected as the Senegalese entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards,where it was shortlisted in two categories: Documentary Feature Film and International Feature Film.

French-Senegalese director Mati Diop fashions her superb, short but potent hybrid doc Dahomey as a slim lever that cracks open the sealed crate of colonial history, sending a hundred of its associated erasures and injustices tumbling into the light […] Dahomey is a striking, stirring example of the poetry that can result when the dead and the dispossessed speak to and through the living. - Jessica Kiang, Variety

About the Director

Mati Diop

Mati Diop is a French filmmaker and actress working in both France and Senegal. Her formally adventurous films explore exile and identity, memory and loss using fiction and documentary tools.

The films of Mati Diop conjure faraway places. Characters both fictional and quasi-documentary long for locales beyond their reach, or sometimes, as if in a trance, they drift magnetically toward them. No matter where the films take place, there is always the specter of somewhere else, and, perhaps with it, the possibility of a different life. These evocations of distant locations—a friend’s tropical Yucatan adventures relayed by text message in Snow Canon, memories of home mournfully recalled in Big in Vietnam, and the idea of an opportunity-rich Europe worth risking one’s life for in Atlantiques and A Thousand Suns (Mille soleils)—suffuse the concrete worlds her characters inhabit so that her films often seem to be in multiple places at once.

About the Panelists

Foreman Bandama

Foreman Bandama is an African archaeologist who studies African preindustrial civilizations. He has specializations in ceramics, glass beads, archaeometallurgy, and heritage studies. His work blends conventional material culture studies and archaeometallurgical analyses to explore the history, innovations, and technological of societies in southern Africa.

He draws liberally from African theory and his lived experience as a product of a crafting rural Tsonga family from Zimbabwe.

Christopher Phillipp

Christopher Phillipp is a collections manager in the Anthropology Department at the Field Museum, where he is responsible for the care of the museum’s anthropology collections from the Pacific islands. He has also worked with the African ethnographic, Meso, Central, South American, and Southeast Asian archaeological and ethnographic collections in the Anthropology Department