Following the powerful premiere screening of Mati Diop’s documentary DAHOMEY, I joined Mwiza Munthali, co-founder and co-director of the New African Film Festival, for a public conversation rooted in reflection.

DAHOMEY — a 2024 international documentary - chronicles the 2021 return of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey back to Benin, prompting reflection on cultural restitution, historical memory, and the ongoing work of decolonization. I opened by inviting the audience into breathwork as a way to sit with the weight of what we witnessed, and to call in intention, hope, and release. From there, I spoke to the film’s central tension: the repatriation of looted objects not as inert artifacts, but as cosmic presences. 

Drawing from the work of Marimba Ani and Robert Farris Thompson, I offered that these objects are active participants in African family and community structures. Their removal represents not only theft of material culture, but violations of land, labor, creativity, spirit, imagination, and energetic balance. The question then becomes not simply how objects return, but how they are reintroduced with care — through storytelling, knowledge-sharing, and ritual — so that they can once again participate meaningfully in the social fabric of Benin, West Africa, and the continent at large.

I also situated DAHOMEY within longer histories and current waves of repatriation — not only of objects, but of people, resources, and imagination. From early 20th-century returns to the continent, to my own return to Ghana (2010-2018), to the Year of Return in 2019, and our present moment, these movements overlap and converge with frequency. I reflected on what Karen Attiah calls “blood art,” on critiques of development frameworks articulated by Ambassador Arikana Chihimbori-Quao, and on the contradictions artists face when navigating cultural institutions that act as gatekeepers of value, taste, and legitimacy. I posed the question openly: can artists occupy these spaces while simultaneously critiquing them and centering radically African ways of knowing and creating?

The conversation also traced DAHOMEY’s cinematic language — its use of lighting, sound, and silence — and its relationship to Mati Diop’s earlier film Atlantics. I reflected on Diop’s framing of DAHOMEY as un film d’anticipation: both speculative and hopeful. Like Atlantics, the documentary holds cosmology, haunting, migration, and absence together, asking us to listen for what moves beneath the visible. In that space — between return and rupture, sound and silence — the film invites us to imagine futures where repair is not symbolic, but lived.