[Source: Reuters]

“Dahomey”, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s film about how returning 26 treasures to Benin, art looted by western powers in the 19th century, sparked a reckoning with colonialism’s legacy.

Won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear prize for best film on Saturday.

The documentary, named after the West African kingdom where the artworks were created before they were looted by a French colonel during his conquest of Dahomey in 1892, looks at the response to the return of some of them from Paris to Benin, of which Dahomey is now part.

“It’s an opportunity to shine a light on a story that’s too little known,” the Paris-born filmmaker said of the prize. “A reality that France is doing everything to cover up, to define as something to be gotten rid of.”

Diop, whose film “Atlantics”, a drama set in Dakar about migration and the ghosts of men lost at sea, won a Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019, said she had detected a hunger in audiences to engage with the colonial past and take responsibility for it.

She, like many other prizewinners and jury members during a politically charged ceremony, called for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Many others took to the stage wearing the keffiyeh scarf that is a symbol of the Palestinian liberation movement.

The best documentary prize went to Israeli-Palestinian film “No Other Land”, about the struggle of filmmaker Basel Adra to preserve his West Bank village as Israeli settlers encroach around it.

“I’m here celebrating the award, but also very hard for me to celebrate when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza,” Adra said.

His co-director, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham added: “I am Israeli, Basel is Palestinian. And in two days we will go back to a land where we are not equal… This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality has to end.”