Julie Dash’s urgent, poetic and groundbreaking 1991 film Daughters of the Dust – the first film by an African-American woman released theatrically in the United States – is being re-released by the BFI in a new digital restoration by Cohen Film Collection at Modern Videofilm in LA.
Part of the pioneering group of African-American filmmakers coming out of UCLA between the ’60s and ’80s, highlighted for contemporary UK audiences by Tate Modern’s season LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema in 2015, Dash’s lush, languid southern Gothic imagery was explicitly referenced in Beyoncé’s acclaimed 2016 HBO film Lemonade. Set on a South Carolina sea island, the film depicts a family preparing to undertake the Great Migration: to move, as African-American survivors of slavery (and the descendants of former slaves), from the American south to the north.
Interweaving her own experiences, family memories and research, Dash’s film establishes a past world of great visual power, forging links between its mythology and the African-American present and thereby shoring up a new sense of black identity, culture and history. It’s a stunning achievement and one which richly deserves this timely re-release, enabling it to be seen more widely by audiences across the UK.
