Julie Dash’s Daughters Of The Dust To Be Re-Released In November Posted by Wilson Morales
July 13, 2016
Cohen Media Group has announced that they will re-release Julie Dash’s seminal independent film DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST to the big screen in a sparkling new 2k restoration this coming November. It will mark the film’s 25th anniversary.
In 1991, this beautifully evocative tone poem about the lives of a family on a small island near South Carolina at the turn of the century became the first film by an African American woman ever to receive widespread theatrical release. Enriched by John Barnes’ eclectic score and Arthur Jafa’s award-winning cinematography, the film was hailed as one of the most visually and sonically ravishing films in American independent cinema, but it has been increasingly difficult to find in the years that followed.
“I’m excited about the restoration of Daughters of the Dust being made available to the public,” said Dash. “And delighted to have the opportunity to engage with a new generation of people who have never seen the film.”
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST is a portrait of the women in Peazant family, who belong to the creole Gullah culture- former slaves living in the coastal Carolinas who have been able to preserve much of their African cultural heritage. As they prepare to migrate, leaving their land and legacy for the promise of the North, conflict and struggles rise to the surface. It unfolds over the course of their final picnic in their current home; saturating the audience with impressionistic colors, African symbolism, Geechee-Gullah rituals, cooking, dialect, and the sound of field cries, all expressing the complex resonances of the Lowcountry lifestyle.
DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST is a post-slavery narrative about cultural memory, notions of home and belonging, and conflicts of Black female identity, a lost cultural connector between Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP and Beyonce’s Lemonade.
