An essential piece of film history, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust depicts the customs and rituals of the Gullah people, descendants of West African slaves who creolized elements of their homeland’s society and relocated to islands just off the coast of Georgia. Over the course of one long day at the dawn of the twentieth century, an extended family contemplates and prepares to migrate to the mainland and leave their way of life behind forever. This hypnotic portrait of a vanishing culture supplied wider audiences first exposure to the Gullah identity and was the first film directed by a black woman to receive general distribution in the United States.
“Dash’s boldly imaginative, ecstatically visionary drama … is one of the best of all American independent films; she turns one family’s experience of the Great Migration into a vast mythopoetic adventure.” – Richard Brody, New Yorker
“Its examination of a bygone way of life is so patient and evocative, so beholden to its own storytelling conventions and rhythms, that watching it is a bit like submitting to a form of time travel.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
