Daughters of the Dust
March 8, 2022
Languid look at the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where African folk-ways were maintained well into the 20th century.
In 1991, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust was released to a film-going public that had never seen anything like it. Set on a single, pivotal day in 1902, the film tells the story of the Peazants, a Gullah family in the Sea Islands who gather to honor their ancestors before many of them abandon the region for the continental North. Sequestered on these remote islands, the Gullah managed to preserve much of their inherited culture, unlike most African-Americans of the time. Narrated by the unborn child of one of the pregnant Peazant daughters, Dash uses the events of the Peazant family picnic to create a lush, impressionistic history of the Gullah people, and with it, a remarkable snapshot of the African-American diaspora into the United States. Dash and photographer Arthur Jafa eschew a more traditional, linear story, instead creating a luxurious, cinematic type of emotional narrative whose specifics accumulate over the course of the film. Like the rippling water that surrounds the Peazants, Daughters functions as both a prism and mirror, reflecting the history of the African-American struggle in the Americas and illuminating the multi-faceted possibilities of their futures. Or, as Nana, the Peazant family matriarch puts it: “We are two people in one body. The last of the old and the first of the new.”
- Director: Julie Dash
- Country: USA
- Year: 1991
- Running Time: 113 min.
- Producer: Lindsay Law, Julie Dash, Arthur Jafa, Steven Jones
- Screenplay: Julie Dash
- Cinematographers: Arthur Jafa
- Editors: Joseph Burton, Amy Carey
- Music: John Barnes
- Filmography: Funny Valentines (1999), Praise House (1991), Daughters of the Dust (1991), Diary of an African Nun (1977), Working Models of Success (1973)
- Language: English