In the lead-up to the wider release of Mati Diop's Dahomey—punctuated by its historic Golden Bear win at this year's Berlinale—there seems to have been a pervading sentiment of confusion (albeit, one primarily documented through firsthand conversation) towards such acclaim for a film this short. How can a documentary that just barely crosses the one-hour mark be worthy of such lofty praise; should we even consider something this minuscule in runtime as feature-length? First of all, yes, 68 minutes is easily within the threshold to be considered a feature, but even ignoring that, the briskness of Dahomey should in no way preclude it from discussions of kudos worthy of equal (or, frankly, superior) merit to those of past festival laureates.

The best sort of film is, in essence, one that is only as long as it needs to be (take notes, Baker...), and the fact of the matter is that 68 minutes is all Diop needs to lay out what the reclamation of stolen Dahomey artifacts entails for the modern-day Republic of Benin and its people. This is ostensibly a moment for celebration, but the return of these 26 treasures—only a fraction of the 7000 known to be stolen by France—only serves to highlight the anger and melancholy at the notion of even having to reclaim these artifacts in the first place. The debate that takes centre-stage in the film's second half allows Diop to drop in on all sorts of disputing viewpoints on the matter, and through it all, Dahomey foregrounds, through almost spectral observation, the frustrations of acknowledging colonialism as a necessary step to overcoming it.

Diop's view is so all-encompassing, in fact, that the ghostliness that afforded Atlantics such chilling depth returns here as Dahomey gives a literal voice to one of those returned treasures. With an expression whose bassy timbre masks the frailty of resigned uncertainty, Diop is able to portray the confusion of being uprooted from a colonial prison and returned to a homeland that is no longer familiar in any way—a reality which is entirely a result of that colonial prison's enduring impact. Whatever victory is achieved in this return is more symbolic than anything, and those at the forefront of the film's debate—that next generation deciding where to go from here—find themselves unable to even assess whether that symbolic victory is anything more than a halfhearted insult, a tease of further restitution that will likely never come.

What Dahomey's runtime says about its reception as a "real film" is really not all that dissimilar from the sort of colonial dismissal buried in this act of "generosity" that stands in the way of the Beninese people in their quest to evaluate the significance of this step. Whether it's a concrete step forward or a symbolic step back, Mati Diop understands that the footprint that step leaves is one that will move beyond the tangible, as the path towards restitution is one that may, in fact, never be trodden towards a final destination. We as an audience may be walking that path for just over an hour, but its expanse is beyond the scope of our view, in both directions.

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