Mati Diop has cinema in her blood. The 42-year-old Senegalese-French actress launched her feature film directing career in spectacular fashion with Atlantics, which took the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 and won a string of awards.
Her documentary Dahomey has made similar waves and was longlisted for the 2025 Oscars. We asked Senegalese film scholar David Murphy to tell us more.
Who is Mati Diop?
Mati Diop is a hugely talented and innovative film director. She is also an accomplished actor who has starred in a number of French films, in particular Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum.
She was born in Paris in 1982 and was raised in France, but frequently visited Senegal during her childhood, as she comes from a Senegalese cultural dynasty.
Her father is Wasis Diop, an inventive and experimental musician who fuses Senegalese folk music with western pop and jazz. Her uncle was the maverick Senegalese filmmaker, Djibril Diop Mambéty. He directed classics like Touki Bouki and Hyenas. For good measure, her mother, Christine Brossard, is involved in the French art world and is a photographer.
Although she had previously made short films, Diop gained global attention in 2019 when she won a prestigious award at the Cannes Film Festival for her first feature-length fiction film, Atlantics.
Her documentary Dahomey won the top award at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival. Over the past few years, Diop has become established as one of the most creative artistic voices making films about contemporary Africa.
What’s Dahomey about?
Dahomey is a documentary about a contentious issue, the repatriation of looted African art works from western museums.
The objects – 26 royal treasures – were taken from the pre-colonial kingdom of Dahomey (in today’s Benin). President Emmanuel Macron of France has voiced his support for the return of such objects and a slow, piecemeal process of repatriation has now begun.
On the surface, the story of Dahomey might not seem to be particularly dramatic. Taking objects from a museum in Paris and sending them to a museum in Benin might be politically important and symbolic. But how do you make a creative, insightful and entertaining film about it that also appeals to a wide audience? Well, essentially, Diop weaves a tale that seeks to explore what it means for Africans that this heritage is being returned. To do that, she gives voice to Africans, whether heritage professionals, students or the general public.
In her most daring creative gesture, she also gives voice to one of the objects being returned, a magnificent, life-sized wooden statue of King Ghézo (who ruled Dahomey in the 1800s), depicted as half-man, half-bird. Many of the items that are displayed in European museums as beautiful but inanimate objects in fact played a highly significant spiritual role in precolonial societies. Essentially, they formed a bridge between the living and the spirit world, and Diop is interested in exploring what it might mean to these spirits to return to an Africa that has been transformed in their absence.
So, Dahomey is not your average documentary. There’s no narrative voiceover that explains the context of the journey home for these objects. Apart from a few on-screen captions explaining the big picture, viewers must piece together the story and decipher its meaning by themselves.
In the first half of the film, we see the curators from Benin and French workmen moving through the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. They assess the condition of the fragile objects as they make an inventory of them and box them safely for the trip. At first, theirs are the only voices we hear.
But then we begin to hear the deep, electronically distorted voice of the statue of King Ghézo who awakens from a long slumber. In this voiceover (written by the Haitian author Makenzy Orcel), Ghézo reflects on the sense of dislocation and confusion at being taken from Africa, his journey over the sea to be exhibited in a museum in Paris, his memories of the continent he left behind.
Once the objects arrive in Benin, the film follows a reverse process. The camera dwells on the African workmen overseeing their installation, interspersed with the voice of the statue trying to make sense of the Africa to which he has returned.
The longest section of the film gives voice to local university students debating what it means to return this heritage. While some view the process as vital, others see it as a distraction from the major issues facing the continent. The film does not seek to nudge the viewer to take sides. What is important is that different African voices are heard so that Africans can reach their own informed decisions.
What’s Atlantics about?
Atlantics is a film about the migration crisis that sees many young Senegalese men (and some women) set off from the coast on dangerous journeys in small fishing boats to try and reach the economic promised land of Europe (in this instance, the Canary Islands). But the film is also a love story about a young couple, Ada and Souleiman.
With a group of young men, many cheated of their wages by a corrupt local businessman, Souleiman embarks on the dangerous journey. The bereft girlfriends and sisters wait for news of their boyfriends and brothers and ultimately take revenge on the businessman. I can’t tell you precisely how this is done without spoiling the plot but let’s just say that the film is a striking mix of social drama and supernatural thriller.
Why is her contribution to film important?
Above all else, Mati Diop is a great storyteller. Atlantics and Dahomey are films that take important current affairs as their starting point, and they weave passionate, complex and strange stories around them.
They’re strange not because Diop is trying to be artistically eccentric, but because life is fundamentally strange and defies easy explanation. This is an artistic standpoint that her uncle would have understood.
Like his work, Diop’s fiction films contain long sections dwelling obsessively on the detail of “real” life while her documentaries contain many fictional elements. In fact, her short 2013 documentary A Thousand Suns is a wonderful homage to the beautiful strangeness of Mambety’s work. In a remarkable blend of fact and fiction, she traces the story of the actors who played the young couple in his avant-garde masterpiece, Touki Bouki.
In the work of both uncle and niece, the real and the fictional, the strange and the mundane are mixed together to make a mysterious and strikingly original body of work that defies categorisation.
David Murphy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
By David Murphy, Professor of French and Postcolonial Studies, University of Strathclyde
