historicity-was-already-taken:
historicity-was-already-taken:
story about a heist team doing a heist of colonial museums and returning unethically stolen sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony to their original communities
but the story isn’t about them
the story is a legal thriller about the repatriation coordinator and the pro bono lawyer who get frantically called in by that community when an artifact goes missing from a museum and shows up unexpectedly at their doorstep and now they are in a shit ton of (potentially international) legal trouble because the heist team did not take the legal ramifications into account, and no one else believes them that they didn’t steal it, and The Law is saying they are legally obligated to return it to the museum and are also probably going to go to prison for this, and activists are protesting, and it’s rocking the repatriation world, and it’s turning into a huge Thing
But is there a UNESCO rep???
ABSOLUTELY there’s a UNESCO rep
Tbh I’m kind of endeared by the idea of a reverse heist team. Like the tropes of the heist team but they’re all members of the rapidly assembled legal team instead. The lawyer. The museum repatriation coordinator. The UNESCO rep. The Indigenous historian. The local community liaison. All working together to solve the problems the heist team left.
Yess yess I neeed this. I fucking love movies where a group of experts etc sit together and try to Get To The Bottom of It, with most of the tension stemming from research, and the intellectual, philosophical, and legal issues at stake. (All the President’s Men being the Ur example of this specific genre.)
And it ends with news footage.