“Cease the Fire” : “Cease fire”, in Gaza, but also in Ukraine, was the slogan of the closing evening of the 74e edition of the Berlinale, which took place on Saturday February 24, the date marking the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The message was read on the lapels of the jacket, on the back, etc., and it was expressed throughout the speeches which marked the awards ceremony.
One of the cult films of the event was the documentary No Other Land (Panorama section, Audience Award), by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli directors – Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor –, on the violence of the Jewish state police in the occupied territories. Filmmakers, actors, festival-goers, etc., all felt it during the Berlin festival: in this dark time, cinema reconnects people.
The jury, chaired by Mexican-Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o, awarded the Golden Bear for best film to Dahomeydocumentary by Franco-Senegalese Mati Diop, a great achievement for the director, born in 1982, who won the Grand Prix at Cannes with Atlantic (2019). The film follows, in November 2021, the restitution of twenty-six works of art to the Republic of Benin, which had been looted in 1892 by French colonial troops – Benin was then called the Kingdom of Dahomey.
One of them is an anthropo-zoomorphic statue representing King Ghézo (who reigned from 1818 to 1858). The beauty of the device lies in the choice to give this work the status of a character: here she “expresses” herself in the first person, through a voice-over, telling us about her return to the country. We feel her moved, worried, when she is about to board, locked in her crate. And the viewer is still with her, so to speak, in the dark, when, at the end of the journey, the technicians prepare to take her out and make the sound of the electric screwdriver heard. Here we are in Benin.
Singular works rewarded
It is then that this dense film (1h07) experiences its second twist, the most politically fruitful, during a debate of rare intensity, in the presence of Beninese students. Dahomey will be the opening film, out of competition, at the Cinéma du Réel in Paris (March 22 to 31) and will be released in theaters on September 25. “As an Afro-descendant filmmaker, I have chosen to be one of those who refuse to forget, who refuse amnesia as a method”underlined Mati Diop when receiving his prize, while affirming his “solidarity with Palestine”.
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