Daughters of the Dust

Dir. Julie Dash. 1991, 112 mins. DCP. With Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbara-O, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, Tommy Hicks. Dash’s influential 1991 masterpiece was her first feature, and the first feature directed by an African American woman to receive a general theatrical release. The year is 1902, in the home of several Gullah people, descendants of African captives who escaped the slave trade to live on islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. Here, members of the Peazant family are on the verge of a planned migration to the U.S. mainland, where American modernity seems to offer a good life. Dash depicts their home as a rarefied world, possibly soon a “paradise lost,” through a masterful interplay of mise-en-scène, symbolism, and magical realist gestures.