The Moon Says It’s in Vienna is the second film in Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll’s trilogy. Following the performance poem of the same title, staged by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Samson Ogiamien at the opening of Tide of Returnsin Venice, the film follows the Mask of Iyagbon as it enters Vienna’s Weltmuseum to confront the institution’s Benin Bronze collection. The mask made by Samson Ogiamien —an imagined amalgam of all the bronzes looted during the 1897 British invasion of Benin City, alongside those since returned—performs a ritual of remembrance, mourning and restitution. Moving through the museum as both witness and ancestor, it calls the dispersed works home, transforming the gallery into a space where colonial violence, cultural memory and spiritual return converge. The film imagines repatriation not only as the return of objects, but as an ongoing ritual of repair.
