In December 2025, at Canal+’s first large-scale content showcase in Paris, Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo were announced as the director and star of Heist of Benin — a thriller described as a film that “intertwines art, love and restitution,” set in contemporary London, financed and distributed by StudioCanal. The announcement generated exactly the response you would expect: celebration of the DuVernay-Oyelowo reunion twelve years after Selma, enthusiasm for the heist genre, appreciation for the subject matter. What it did not generate was the more difficult conversation.
Let me have that conversation.
The Benin Bronzes are a collection of more than 5,000 brass and bronze plaques, sculptures, and royal objects created by the craftsmen of the Kingdom of Benin from the 13th century onward, looted by British military forces during the punitive expedition of 1897. They are currently held in 161 institutions across Europe, North America, and beyond — the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian, institutions in Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.
They belong to Benin City. Some have been returned. Germany returned significant collections. The Horniman Museum and the University of Aberdeen returned their holdings. Cambridge University’s controversial decision to transfer its collection to the Nigerian federal government rather than directly to the Benin Royal Court created a dispute that remains unresolved. The full restitution argument is active, politically charged, and unfinished.
Into this context comes a Hollywood thriller. Set in London.
What the Film Is
DuVernay has described Heist of Benin as a film that “speaks to history, identity and love, all through the lens of a high-stakes, modern adventure.” Oyelowo, whose production company Yoruba Saxon is co-producing the film, said they had “been looking for the right story to tell together again” and that the film’s themes “matter to us both.” The screenplay is by Jesse Quiñones from his own original concept. Production and distribution through StudioCanal, Canal+’s global production and sales arm.
This is, by the standards of mainstream cinema’s engagement with African restitution debates, an extraordinary development. A film made by a Black American woman director and a British-Nigerian actor-producer, with a screenplay that appears to engage seriously with one of the most urgent outstanding questions in African cultural heritage. On a global distribution platform. In a genre — the heist thriller — that is commercially accessible in a way that documentary or art cinema engagement with restitution has not been.
The film’s potential to bring the Benin Bronzes debate into the living rooms of tens of millions of viewers who have never heard of the 1897 punitive expedition is real. That matters. I want to say clearly that the film matters and that its existence is a gain for this conversation.
The Question the Trade Press Has Not Asked
StudioCanal is the production and distribution arm of Canal+ Group. Canal+ Group is headquartered in Paris. Its majority owner, through Vivendi, is the Bolloré Group — a French family holding company whose commercial history on the African continent is long and complicated, encompassing infrastructure, media, port operations, and a range of other investments that have attracted critical scrutiny from African civil society and European journalism over several decades.
StudioCanal will finance, distribute, and handle international sales for a film about Britain’s colonial looting of African artefacts.
I am not suggesting that this makes the film wrong to make or wrong to see. I am suggesting that no African trade publication has noted the structural irony of the arrangement — that the film about colonial extraction from African culture is being bankrolled and distributed by a European company with its own contested presence on the African continent. That is a conversation worth having, not as an accusation but as an observation about how this industry works and who ends up controlling the commercial pipeline for stories about African heritage.
The London Setting
The film is set in contemporary London. Not in Benin City. Not in Lagos. In the city where the British Museum currently holds approximately 900 Benin Bronzes, making it the largest institutional holder of these objects in the world.
The London setting is commercially rational — it places the story in a world legible to the international audience the film needs to reach to have commercial viability at the scale StudioCanal requires. It also means that the specific lived reality of Benin City in 2026 — the active cultural and political work being done there to recover this heritage, the community of artists and scholars and royal court officials whose daily lives are shaped by the ongoing absence of these objects — is the backdrop of the film rather than its setting.
Oyelowo’s Yoruba Saxon company is co-producing. His stated personal connection to the subject — his family roots in the Edo region — is meaningful. The film is not being made without African creative investment. It is being made at a distance from the community most directly affected, by people with connections to that community, financed by a European company, set in Europe.
READ ALSO: Shaka iLembe Is Ending Soon
This is how most African stories that reach the global mainstream get made. Heist of Benin is not exceptional in this regard. It is typical. The question is whether the industry is willing to build the conditions under which exceptional becomes possible — under which a film about the Benin Bronzes can be set in Benin City and still reach the global audience that the story deserves.
That question is harder than celebrating this film’s existence. Both things deserve attention.
Heist of Benin is currently in pre-production. Director: Ava DuVernay. Starring: David Oyelowo. Produced by Endurance Media and Yoruba Saxon. Financed and distributed by StudioCanal/Canal+.
— Amara Diallo has covered African cinema and cultural heritage from Dakar for twenty-five years.
