In November 2021, 61 years after Benin gained independence from the French empire, 26 of the many thousands of plundered national antiquities were returned by France to their African home. Inserting an inquisitive, imaginative intelligence into this key moment in the troubled timeline of post-imperial cultural politics, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop fashions her superb, short but potent hybrid doc “Dahomey” as a slim lever that cracks open the sealed crate of colonial history, sending a hundred of its associated erasures and injustices tumbling into the light. 

The film takes its title from the kingdom on Benin’s Atlantic coast, that existed in formidable militarism for 300 years until 1894, and whose fabled female warriors were recently the subject of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Woman King.” But “Dahomey” starts far from the pomp and grandeur of that wealthy, warlike kingdom, in the basement level of the Parisian Musée du Quai Branly, where CCTV cameras stare down at empty, bare-walled, windowless corridors. This is where several of the artifacts, including a wooden statue of King Gezo, who ruled Dahomey in the mid-1800s and whose pose looks irresistibly like he’s giving a Black Power salute, are being packed up ready for transportation. 

Diop and DP Josephine Drouin Viallard follow with unobtrusive but forensic interest the procedure of packing Gezo into his crate: the care taken not to damage the idol, the paper that protects his rear like a diaper, the complicated internal construction of the box that is designed to ensure he isn’t rattled in transit. Still, there’s an odd feeling of wrongness — almost of insult — that Gezo is being packed face-down. Shouldn’t he be able to see the light as long as possible before the lid is closed?

The impulse to anthropomorphize this diminutive wooden representation is clearly one Diop shares. Suddenly we are hearing the thoughts of statue-Gezo himself, voiced by Makenzy Orcel, and given an unearthly, resonating timbre by sound designers Corneille Houssou, Nicolas Becker and Cyril Holtz, as through his voice is rushing to us through long tunnels of time. He contemplates, with prideful contempt and incredulity, his long years of captivity “in the caverns of the civilized world.” 

The interludes of Gezo’s commentary are relatively short. But his haughty words, broken like shards of ancient pottery, and spoken in Fon, the Dahomey language still used by roughly one-sixth of Benin’s population, flavor the whole film with mysterious unease. It haunts even the most straightforwardly observational sections such as the parade that greets the returning artifacts, or the Beninese curator cataloguing the cargo. And in the film’s final section, a university-debate-style discussion in a large hall that was staged by Diop but unfolds with spontaneous authenticity, many of the contrasting views on the issues that this paltry yet pivotal act of restitution brings up, sound like modern-day echoes of the statue’s own weariness and anger, its wariness and fear.

There is a version of this film that might use the occasion as a simple promotional tool to encourage postcolonial powers to embark on greater and more complete reparations programs, but “Dahomey,” is much more than that film. Every straightforwardly celebratory impulse is complicated by a far greater ambivalence about whether actual redress can ever be made and a kind of lyrical wonderment about what it would even look like if it was. 

One of the young debaters calls the return of the 26 pieces “a savage insult.” Another sees its motivation as solely political, a token gesture made by the French to distract from domestic pressures. And when one young woman locates the occasion’s importance in how it can help to rewire the population’s understanding of their own history — “I was told I was descended from slaves,” she says fiercely, “But I was descended from Amazons” — even that triumph is tempered by Diop’s careful inclusion of another of the returned artworks: an ornate Dahomey throne adorned with dozens of figurines representing the Kingdom’s powerful slave trade. Dahomey, particularly under Gezo, derived a great deal of wealth and a good portion of its national identity from conquering and enslaving neighboring peoples. 

All of this context creates a picture far more interconnectedly vast and complex than the film’s 68-minute runtime suggests, but it does not lessen the simple power of certain motifs and images. A white-coated worker at the Beninese museum stops in front of the statue of King Behazin, represented as a shark, and gazes at it silently, his lips moving as though in song or prayer. There is some kind of communion with the past going on, and just as much as Diop’s Cannes-awarded debut feature “Atlantics,’ which followed women possessed by their menfolk lost at sea, “Dahomey” is a striking, stirring example of the poetry that can result when the dead and the dispossessed speak to and through the living.