There are 169 eligible feature documentaries competing for the upcoming Oscars, and two of the most acclaimed explore the legacies of colonialism and present-day movements to address them. “Dahomey” and “Sugarcane” will vie against films including the celeb-powered “Will & Harper,” a Netflix release about a road trip by Will Ferrell and former “SNL” writer Harper Steele after her transition to a woman, and “No Other Land,” a documentary about strife on the West Bank. Here’s a closer look at “Dahomey” and “Sugarcane.”
‘Dahomey’
Hypnotic, provocative and layered with meaning, “Dahomey” finds poetry and mystery as it chronicles the return of 26 historical artifacts from Paris to Benin — once the Kingdom of Dahomey — where French troops snatched thousands more during the 1892 invasion of the West African nation.
French Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop (“Atlantics”), whose documentary won the Golden Bear prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, adopts an observational form but flips things around. The 2021 transit is seen, in part, from the perspective of one of the treasures, known as “26”: a wooden statue of King Ghezo, a clenched fist raised, whose murky, contrabass voice rumbles through an electronic haze. “I journeyed so long in my mind, but it was so dark in this foreign place,” he intones, in Fon, the nearly eradicated language of Dahomey, “that I lost myself in my dreams.”
The device carried over from another project Diop had been cultivating, about an African mask telling its own story. This proved helpful, as the filmmaker had only two weeks from the announcement of the repatriation of the works from Paris’ Musée du Quai Branly to gain access and establish a production team. “I don’t feel like the idea belongs to me,” she notes. To make an artifact speak is “a revindication coming from an African perspective, to consider these artifacts as subjects and not as objects.”
The voice was created in collaboration with sound designers Corneille Houssou, Nicolas Becker and Cyril Holtz and the Haitian poet Makenzy Orcel, who recorded the text co-written with Diop. At times, the voice shifts fluidly from masculine to feminine and becomes suggestively plural.
“They’re not only the voices of the 26 treasures that are returning, they are the voices of all the artifacts stolen during colonization,” says Diop, niece of Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty, whose 1973 “Touki Bouki” is a landmark of African cinema. “They are the vehicles who carry an army of souls of men and women who have been deported during slave trade, an army of dispossessed souls. They also represent the vast diaspora, the contemporary one.”
The second half of “Dahomey” features an extended public debate among university students in Benin that addresses an array of complex issues raised by the treasures’ return, aligning historical past with speculative future. “It was important,” Diop says, “to make sure that the youth was heard. It doesn’t make sense to separate the subject of restitution and the subject of the youth.
“To me, it’s completely inseparable.”
‘Sugarcane’
When news broke three years ago about the discovery of more than 200 potential unmarked graves on the site of a former residential school for Indigenous children in British Columbia, Emily Kassie immediately felt “gut-pulled” to the story, which rippled through an entire network of Catholic-run institutions across North America.
The journalist and filmmaker found an entry point with the Williams Lake First Nation, whose chief, Willie Sellars, invited her to document the community’s own inquiry into sexual abuse, infanticide and other atrocities at the St. Joseph’s Mission school, which shut down in 1981. The Williams Lake First Nation search led to the discovery of more graves.
Kassie had already reached out to fellow journalist Julian Brave NoiseCat, a friend for a decade, who was shocked. “That was the school that my family was sent to, and where my father was born,” he says. “Out of 139 schools,” he marvels, “she happened to choose the one school.”
The pair teamed up to make “Sugarcane,” a harrowing account that deftly weaves together multiple threads as a community struggles to uncover the truth and find justice and healing. “We felt that we weren’t just being led by our instincts as journalists and storytellers,” NoiseCat says, “but also events that were greater than ourselves.”
The film, which won the directing prize for U.S. documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, compassionately personalizes the unspeakable: It introduces former Williams Lake chief Rick Gilbert, a student at St. Joseph’s who learns that one of its priests was his father; and likewise devotes time to NoiseCat’s father and grandmother.
NoiseCat moved in with his father, artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, for two years during the making of the film. “It was the first time we lived together since I was 6 years old,” he said. “There’s a lot of history to this relationship, as you can see.” Despite the filmmaker’s fear in taking such a leap, the risks involved paid off. “I would give him a ton of credit in the way that he trusted me and opened up,” NoiseCat says of his father.
Bringing a multigenerational horror down to human scale was key. “We both knew that the emotional truth of the film was going to be as important as the journalistic truth,” Kassie says. “The cinematic language needed to bring people deep into the world and under the skin of this thing, so that people can understand that this is not a story of the past but a story of the present.”