Essential Arthouse: Daughters of the Dust (1991)
A languid, impressionistic story of three generations of Gullah women living on the South Carolina Sea Islands in 1902. (NR, 112 min.)
Showtimes
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
(TBD)
This monthly series showcases “essential arthouse” films everyone should see on the big screen. Arthouse is a film genre which encompasses films where the content and style – often artistic or experimental – adhere with as little compromise as possible to the filmmakers’ personal artistic vision. This series is Free for Members.
At the dawn of the 20th century, a multi-generational family in the Gullah community on the Sea Islands off of South Carolina – former West African slaves who adopted many of their ancestors’ Yoruba traditions – struggle to maintain their cultural heritage and folklore while contemplating a migration to the mainland, even further from their roots.
Cohen Media Group is proud to present the 25th anniversary restoration of director Julie Dash’s landmark film “Daughters of the Dust.” The first wide release by a black female filmmaker, “Daughters of the Dust” was met with wild critical acclaim and rapturous audience response when it initially opened in 1991. Casting a long legacy, “Daughters of the Dust” still resonates today, most recently as a major in influence on Beyonce’s video album “Lemonade.” Restored (in conjunction with UCLA) for the first time with proper color grading overseen by cinematographer AJ Jafa, audiences will finally see the film exactly as Julie Dash intended.
[Cohen Media Group]
Starring Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbara-O, Trula Hoosier, Bahni Turpin, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, Tony King
Director: Julie Dash
Genre: Drama, History, Romance
"A film of spellbinding visual beauty."
— Stephen Holden, New York Times
"A beautifully filmed historical drama."
— Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune
"A ravishing visual exhumation of a vanished world."
— Geoff Brown, Times (UK)
"An absorbing, spirited film that merits considerable respect."
— Clifford Terry, Chicago Tribune
"This is balletic, operatic cinema, and a celebration of cinema itself."
— Lizzie Francke, Sight & Sound
"It is an astonishing, vivid portrait not only of a time and place, but of an era's spirit."
— Rita Kempley, Washington Post
"In a series of gently lyrical tableaux, Dash captures the rich traditions of this Gullah family, their oral sagas and their religious beliefs."
— Kathleen Carroll, New York Daily News
"It's a true original and, as such, of considerable value both as a film and as a sad yet hopeful summation of history as memory and experience."
— Derek Malcolm, Guardian
"Daughters of the Dust abounds with stunning motifs and tableaux, the iconography seemingly sourced from dreams as much as from history and folklore."
— Melissa Anderson, Village Voice
"Daughters of the Dust moves with a lyrical beauty that blends hopes, memories, heritage and generational bonds into the limitless expanse of an island horizon."
— Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle
"The film rewards the patient viewer who succumbs to its trancelike spell and understands that the movie is about the rhythms and rituals of a culture remembered."
— Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Let's thank Julie Dash for her persistence in bringing us this jewel. This is a story we will tell our children again and again -- and with each retelling, the colors will swell in our souls."
— Patricia Smith, Boston Globe
"Shot on the Sea Island beaches, the film is gloriously beautiful. Sun and sand and sea all are at their best, and when Dash moves the camera into the woods, all the proper eeriness prevails."
— Joe Pollack, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Writer-producer-director Julie Dash has taken extraordinary risks. The movie develops and grows and swells into something remarkable and alive, like an idea or a feeling or a child in the womb."
— Judy Gerstel, Detroit Free Press
"An Atlanta-based artist making her long-worked-for feature debut, Ms. Dash is a filmmaker of startling originality and delicacy. Her film is poetry in motion, part dream-memory, part tattered family album."
— Eleanor Ringel Cater, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"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, The New Yorker
"The film offers a poetic political vision of a society falling between the stools of progression and regression, asking whether standing off against the travesties of the antebellum American South is the only way to attain true freedom."
— David Jenkins, Little White Lies
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