This week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “Dahomey” by Mati Diop and “Le procès du chien” by and with Laetitia Dosch.
Published
Reading time: 7 min
Dahomey is a documentary mixed with fiction, it is about the restitution by France of works stolen from Benin, formerly Dahomey, during the colonial period.
And from this important date, November 2021, the French-Senegalese filmmaker makes a film that is rather short (1h08) but full of symbols and full of beautiful images. Mati Diop filmed the departure and careful packing of the 26 treasures from the Quai Branly Museum returned to Benin and their arrival in another museum “at home”, so to speak, in Cotonou.
Trying to repair a historical mistake, repenting of a pillage, also allowing this African youth to re-appropriate their culture and history and to debate them, so many exciting issues that irrigate this project. And if at the beginning we can be disconcerted by a black screen from which only a voice emerges – that of the statue of King Ghézo who speaks to us directly in the ancient Fon language –, we are struck, when the film opens, by the intensity of the reception reserved by the Beninese for these 26 works. We feel both their emotion and that of the director.
Mati Diop also pleads with Dahomey so that the Ministry of Culture finally passes the framework law on the restitution of works of art looted from former colonies.
Laetitia Dosch – revealed in cinema in Young woman by Léonor Serraille in 2016, then in Simple passion by Danielle Arbid – comes from the theater. Unclassifiable, going from burlesque to tragedy in the blink of an eye, she directs here for the first time.
After sharing the stage with a horse, Laetitia Dosch tells us all about her interest in animals and nature thanks to Cosmos, a dog summoned to court where he risks his skin. Cosmos is accused of biting women for no reason. And it is Laetitia Dosch, as a lawyer for lost causes, who takes up his defense.
In this improbable trial, the absurd gives way to real questions about our relationship with the animal kingdom, we have fun, but not only that… With François Damiens and Jean-Pascal Zadi, Laetitia Dosch finds playmates who share her sense of the absurd, she succeeds in her first film behind the camera and continues to amaze us as a broad-spectrum actress. The dog Kod, for his part, makes a good debut in cinema.