Christophe Nanga-Oly

Intimacy and entertainment, melancholy and fury, modesty and drive, birth and disappearance. Four girls, four boys. Eight solitudes told with lyric and passion, between Earth and Cosmos, along the way towards their Metamorphoses.

Thousands of royal artifacts of Dahomey, a West African kingdom, were taken by French colonists in the 19th century for collection and display in Paris. Centuries later, a fraction returned to their home in modern-day Benin. This dramatized documentary follows the journey of 26 of the treasures as told by cultural art historians, embattled university students, and one of the repatriated statues himself.