From Hilde, With Love to Dahomey: The undead memories of Holocaust, colonialism

The film, set in 1943, begins with the arrest of a pregnant Hilde. The officer who shows up to pick her up starts by being almost benign– his wife is expecting too, so please can he touch her bump? It feels startlingly intimate; there’s also an entitled offensiveness in the gesture, almost as if Hilde’s body now belongs to the state, for it to do what it will.

Soon enough, she is incarcerated, and the only way she can postpone certain death is to make herself useful in the ward with other expecting mothers. She’s been trained as a dentist’s assistant, and is deft with her touch as she soothes the women in pain, even as she raises her baby : the crude doctor attending to her birth says the baby won’t survive, but Hilde is determined, and it lives, and thrives.

This little group of rebels, all thinking they will change the world, swim in the lake, and picnic under the trees. Learning the Morse code, trying to send messages to Moscow ( we learn, in the end, how only one harmless message finds its way to its destination), making love, all seem of a piece, and when the brutal reality dawns upon them, it is too late.

That there was resistance to the growing power of Hitler and its anti-semitism, from within its own ranks, is not a well-known fact. ‘From Hilde, With Love’ shows us that facet, and it feels like a missing piece falling into place.

A very different film, Mati Diop’s ‘Dahomey’, brings to the fore a similar feeling of connecting the dots when 26 stolen objects were sent back from Paris to Benin in 2021, 61 years after the African country gained independence from France.

The large-scale looting of thousands of artefacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey ( as Benin used to be known), took place over a century ago. Now with their return, it would appear to be a restitution, and a closure, but the low numbers are ‘humiliating’, said the French-Senegalese director at the press conference after the screening.

The 67 minutes film uses a unique documentary approach laced with fantasy, as one of the artefacts — a mighty statue of King Ghezo packed carefully within a container — suddenly finds a human voice. Why was he in darkness all these years? There’s joy and pride at the return of these items, but there’s also the sorrow that comes from being uprooted, and taken away to an alien land.

‘Dahomey’ powerfully challenges post-colonial notions of reparations and repair: as a young woman says, ‘I speak French, but I am not French’. What does it mean to not have access to the language of your ancestors? Memories and history go hand in hand.