Mati Diop's ghost cinema

Mati Diop is arguably the most formally inventive African filmmaker currently working, and one of the most difficult to categorise. Her films — Atlantics, Dahomey, and the earlier short A Thousand Suns — do not sit comfortably in any of the industry's default containers. They are neither straight arthouse nor documentary nor historical drama nor genre film, and their refusal to be categorised has been a large part of why they have accumulated the critical attention they have.

Atlantics remains the reference point for what her cinema does. The film treats ghosts as protagonists rather than devices, and refuses to make the metaphysical claim explicit — the audience is asked to accept the ghosts as a fact of the film's world without being told what they mean. That refusal to explain is not obscurity; it is a specific formal argument that colonial and postcolonial histories cannot be tidied into the psychological realism the European festival tradition demands. Diop is building a cinema that trusts the audience to sit inside a mystery.

Dahomey extends the argument into non-fiction. The film follows the restitution of Beninese royal artifacts from a French museum to their originating culture, and the object of the documentary is essentially the political and metaphysical weight of the objects themselves. It is a documentary in the sense that the events depicted are real; it is not a documentary in any sense that documentary as an industry category usually implies. Diop is again refusing the containers.

The critique of her work is a fair one about accessibility. Her films demand a specific kind of viewing attention that a large audience cannot always give, and the sales figures reflect that constraint. Atlantics won the Grand Prix at Cannes and reached a smaller audience than a similarly reviewed European auteur film would have. Dahomey has been more of a critical event than a commercial one. The films are, in a specific sense, harder to sell than their quality justifies.

What Diop's cinema also does, less visibly, is expand what is possible for younger African filmmakers to attempt. The category-refusing film — neither strictly arthouse nor strictly documentary, neither strictly national nor strictly diasporic — is a legitimate form now in a way it was not a decade ago, and Diop's work is one of the reasons why. The next generation of formally inventive African filmmakers will be working in a landscape she helped create. That is a durable contribution regardless of individual box office.