In her award-winning documentary Dahomey, director Mati Diop imagines the voice of royal treasures looted from West Africa by European colonisers and only recently sent back to their homeland in present-day Benin. She tells RFI she hopes it will prompt reflection on displacement, exile and return - not just of objects, but of people.

Dahomey, released in France this week, tells the story of 26 artefacts stolen by 19th-century French troops from the former African kingdom of the same name, including a throne and sculptures representing the dynasty's warrior kings.

In 2021, the collection was returned from the Quai Branly museum in Paris to Cotonou in Benin.

Diop follows the objects on this journey, travelling with them as they are packed and flown to the presidential palace in Benin, where they are greeted by visitors eager to see their heritage on display at last.

"From the moment they were removed from the display cases in Paris to being packed in crates, right up to arriving in Cotonou, I absolutely wanted to follow everything," she told RFI. "I didn't want to miss anything from the return trip."

She describes the journey as a shared experience and "an odyssey".

By documenting it, Diop hoped to represent a "community of souls much larger than that of the works" - including "men and women deported during the slave trade, dispossessed, colonised", the contemporary diaspora, and people in Benin today.

"The subject of restitution is a movement, a gesture, and it is symbolically very loaded," she said.