"Daughters of the Dust" isn't an easy work, but it's a very fine accomplishment, and one of the most important African American films of the last 20 years.
Julie Dash has chosen to share with her audience a chapter of black history that is still new to most white Americans, the internal issues that came with Black Americans as they made their way North in the years between 1900 and 1920. The separation from the soil, the divorce from those remnants of West African culture that survived through the holocaust of slavery. The psychic tearing of the transition from rural to urban culture. The skin game that Yellow Mary and other "fair skinned" Black people had to play in order to survive in White America. If the film is boring to many, let it be plainly said that it is boring for many because the film maker courageously chose to examine a piece of history that most White Americans- and many Black ones- no longer care much about.
If you want to be entertained, this isn't a film you'll enjoy. "Daughters of the Dust" offers instead an opportunity to probe deep, to look close at the dreamy quality of an internal life, and a balanced relationship with the earth, that most of our peoples in the United States have chosen to leave behind them for exactly the wrong reasons. Let those who have difficulty thinking about these things stick to action films. "Daughters of the Dust" is about something more akin to the sense of wonder that's being rapidly stamped out of many of us in the name of mom, apple pie, and the gross national product. It is worth not one, but many viewings. Julie Dash has created a masterpiece of American cinema.
