Daughters of the Dust (1992)

Powerful

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It's tough to sort my feelings on Daughters of the Dust. The film is built around a compelling and often forgotten segment of black history that maintains social resonance beyond its time and place; director Julie Dash deserves credit for capturing the emotion and pain of cultural transformation, and there are lovely images throughout. But Daughters of the Dust makes very little effort to engage the audience: it's difficult to maintain a sense of each character's individual goals, and the film often sacrifices narrative momentum for visual poetry. Unfortunately, I'm left with a film that interests me more in theory than in practice. -TK 9/30/10

Let me start out by saying I'm a black man. I might not have any business trying to figure out what Ms. Dash is trying to say. I do know what does and doesn't work for me. I need subtitles. I don't need obfuscation which I felt was the basic strategy employed here. There may be a point in confusing the audience to a certain point but eventually we'll need some things cleared up. This is what I got from the film:The slave trade continued awhile longer on these islands. I wasn't sure if slavery continued longer here than anywhere else(longer than in Galveston, TX). Forced incestuous mating and breeding took place here as well. The internal struggle to enter a new phase of life in a new place was affecting the entire family. The basic "action" in the film is the attempt to have a final family get-together without too much conflict and altercation. There are no white people in the film. There are a few Muslims and one Native American that is a key figure in the story. As pure visual experience the film had some wonderful, fleeting moments. Tommy Redmond Hicks is in it. Why did the light skinned girl run away near the end? The actress doing the child voice over was awful.It doesn't work.

This is one of the finest black films of the last twenty years. Julie Dash has created an evocative portrait of African American life that still holds an African past in the cradle of everyday life. The film is also a brilliant depiction of gender relations in black communities. Daughters of the Dust presents a vital, spiritual, and haunting portrait of black women, their agency and their connection to a nurturing ancestral past. Very few films about black people seriously explore the deep spiritual connections between Old and New World, and fewer still look so carefully at a particular community. The Gullah people of the Sea Islands are a group that remains largely unknown in both mainstream and black culture. As group that has clearly adapted to life in a new place, they still demonstrate powerful connections to an African past. In their adaptation and connection, they show the strength and resilience of black communities and cultures.

I am taken with stories of the undeveloped and developing peoples and would have liked to learn of the Gullah culture. I did my best to follow this mishmash for 45 minutes. It seems to have several dialects that would be impossible to close caption and completely unintelligible as it is. Only a rare person would get anything from it.It appears to start with a black preacher and his wife appearing on the scene where a black woman hidden behind a fluffy white object is approaching accompanied by an attractive light-skinned woman. As the lighting changes, some of the characters appear to shift from Caucasian to Negroid. I have no idea of what happened while I attempted to watch with my wife who has very good hearing and diction and could make no sense of it either.I didn't attempt to watch the last half.