The Musée du Quai Branly is a long ark of a building perched over a garden, whose foliage screens the museum from its busy namesake thoroughfare on the banks of the Seine. Literally overshadowed by the Eiffel Tower, it houses more than three hundred thousand pieces of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, most of them legacies of France’s colonial empire. Its opening, in 2006, was billed as an enlightened departure from the practice of exhibiting non-European works as anthropological specimens; the building’s architect, Jean Nouvel, described it as a place of spiritual regeneration, where the Western curatorial apparatus would “vanish before the sacred objects so we may enter into communion with them.” But the vibes within are less enchanting than uncanny. The cavernous main gallery is a maze of shadows and imitation mud walls, where masks look out from between oversized photographs of tropical vegetation. “I’ll never be familiar with this space,” Mati Diop said when we visited last month. “It’s like ‘The Matrix.’ 

Diop, a French Senegalese filmmaker who won international renown for her début feature, “Atlantics,” seemed viscerally disturbed by the museum, describing its “mise en scène” as depressing, manipulative, and, switching to English, which she speaks fluently, “fucked up.” Everything was wrong, she insisted, from the folkloric condescension of the walls’ earthy colors to the crowded shelves of musical instruments in visible storage, which reminded her of bodies in a morgue. Most troubling were the grim-faced security guards, nearly all of them elderly Black men. “Psychologically, what does it do to a person to spend an entire day in a space whose violent context”—colonialism—“has been completely effaced?” Diop whispered. “And yet it’s everywhere.” She indicated a man in a dark suit beside a colorful beaded crown from the kingdom of Dahomey, now southern Benin. “The presence of these men and of this patrimony in the museum are part of the same story,” she continued. “It’s dizzying.”

Her new film, a fantastical documentary titled “Dahomey,” chronicles the return of the so-called Dahomey treasures, comprising twenty-six of the many art works that French troops seized in the eighteen-nineties while subjugating the kingdom. (A newspaper of the time crowed that the vanquished natives, whose “painted gods” had failed to defend them, “wouldn’t miss the wood.”) Dahomean sculptures were placed in anthropology museums, where they were admired by Picasso and Apollinaire. But in 2018 decades of diplomacy and activism culminated in Emmanuel Macron’s historic decision to repatriate the art works to Benin. Diop’s film follows them from the Quai Branly to a hero’s welcome in Cotonou, the country’s largest city, where they are discussed by students at a local university after an exhibition at the Presidential palace. “I cried for fifteen minutes,” one student says after seeing the show. Another declares, “What was looted more than a century ago is our soul.”

Vexing questions shadow the jubilant homecoming. What does it mean for art works to “go back” to a country that didn’t exist when they were taken? Can they have any meaning for a population alienated from their history? Or do they risk becoming mere tools of state propaganda? And what about the countless stolen objects that Western museums haven’t returned? In Diop’s otherworldly conceit, these anxieties are voiced by “26”—a defiantly posed statue of the Dahomean king Ghezo, who speaks for the treasures in a fathomless, reverberant growl. (It

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