What Won In Berlin

A slender but substantial Big-Issue movie took the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival this past weekend. Dahomey, Mati Diop’s dense, slightly eerie, deeply affecting examination of cultural restitution—specifically the 2021 return of 26 African artifacts from France to Benin—won the Golden Bear for best film, making it the second year in a row that the Berlinale recognized a documentary with its main award.

Narrating the 68-minute feature in a bizarre, electrically distorted basso profundo is the imagined voice of King Gezo’s 19^th century wood-and-metal statue, the 26^th and final item among the numbered royal treasures being returned to the kingdom of Dahomey, located within the republic of Benin. Over 130 years ago, colonial French forces plundered these, just a fraction of the loot that they took with them back to France. And now, as Diop shows, those artifacts, most recently at Paris’s Musée du Quay Branly, were tenderly wrapped up and placed into carefully padded wooden crates, flown down to Africa and met with wild celebrations in the streets as they made their way to a new home.

By one estimation, 90 percent of Benin’s cultural heritage is overseas—and the return of these 26 items, out of a possible 7,000 still in France, are more about the French government burnishing their image with a token gesture than it is rectifying a century-old injustice. “Let’s be aware that this is a savage insult,” says one participant in a town-hall-style discussion of the repatriation. “We are slaves of our own language,” says another Beninese, who points out the dark irony that they’re all debating in French—the only tongue many of them ever learned, and another sign of how removed they have become from their ancestry. Even King Gezo’s statue voices his disorientation from all the dislocation. “Where I am is where I must be? I wonder,” he intones. Diop’s documentary, both coolly observational and righteously agitated, offers no easy answers.

Dahomey’s win is a welcome example of the festival’s highest honor going to one of the best films in competition. But this year’s uneven slate made sure that there were no obvious frontrunners for most of the other categories. Winning second-place Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize was A Traveler’s Needs, the latest from prolific director Hong Sangsoo. The miniaturist filmmaker’s elliptical comedy-dramas, borderline-obsessive retreads of exhaustingly similar awkward human interactions, continue to have niche appeal among a small but fervent international group of loyalists. He was just as surprised as anyone by the recognition. “I don’t know what you saw in the film,” he said in his acceptance speech.

Third-place Silver Bear Jury Prize went to the divisive L’Empire, a deliriously subversive mock sci-fi epic from gleeful provocateur Bruno Dumont. His pastiche of gritty neo-realism and flaky space fantasy, set in a small coastal beach town in Northern France, plays like a po-faced Dardenne brothers social drama crossed with whiffs of Luc Besson revisiting his kooky Fifth Element heyday. Imagine working-class grunts wielding light sabers, a tow-headed toddler who’s an intergalactic antichrist, a bikini’ed princess seduced by a skeevy hoodie-wearing dark lord, a spaceship in the shape of a gothic cathedral and an imperial cruiser that looks more like a floating Versailles. It’s the kind of lark where a game actor like Fabrice Luchini wears an opera buffa jumpsuit and prances around squealing “The Apocalypse! The Apocalypse!” as his invading forces head towards the planet earth. In other words, the perfect wink-wink antidote to anyone with Dune overload.

Though it went home empty-handed, Viktor Kossakovsky’s Architecton offered by far the most sumptuous, immersive and overwhelming cinematic experience of the festival. This delirious ode to building materials—churned-up rocks, quarried stone, Brobdingnagian boulders, toothpaste-soft cement—is a sumptuous reminder of humanity’s time-tested capacity to erect facades that stand for thousands of years, yet still choose to throw up subpar housing that barely lasts a few decades in the face of regional war and natural earthquakes. This mediative documentary revels in rockslides and detonations, then mixes in quiet insights from Italian architect Michele De Lucchi on the meaning of human-built structures and their cumulative impact on the ravaged surface of the earth.

Most haunting film, though, and the recipient of the festival’s Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for Martin Gschlacht’s chronically unsettling cinematography, was Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s historical drama The Devil’s Bath. Their harrowing look at an 18^th century newlywed bride struggling to be a good wife in a primitive northern Austrian village is a relentlessly gloomy condemnation of patriarchal privilege and misogynistic mores. Any movie that begins with infanticide, boasts a rotting corpse on an outdoor mantle, treats a severed finger as a fertility talisman, and mixes devout Christian beliefs and backward pagan superstitions, sets up high expectations for its finale. And yet, the bleak, languid story develops into one of the most unsettling climaxes in recent memory, with a shock ending of blood and revelry that will leave you slack-jawed.