Daughters of the Dust

Following a run of acclaimed short films, writer-director-producer Julie Dash made history with her 1992 fiction feature debut Daughters of the Dust, the first film directed by an African American woman to receive a national theatrical release. Set just after the turn of the 20th century, Dash’s richly evocative screenplay sketches an impressionistic portrait of the Gullah people—an independent community of formerly enslaved people and their descendents living on the Sea Islands off the coast of North Carolina and Georgia. Adopting a circular narrative structure, with voice-over narration supplied by the spirit of an unborn child who speaks in Gullah Creole, the film follows three generations of women from the Peazant family as they prepare to migrate to the mainland, giving rise to a lyrical meditation on the American experience of diaspora, embodied by characters torn between their attachment to the traditions and ways of life handed down by their African ancestors on the one hand, and on the other the desire to embrace a more “modern”—if not necessarily better—life in the industrialized North.