Daughters of the Dust is a film about the descendants of the Gullah people of the islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, directed by Julie Dash. It is the first American film directed by an African American woman to get a general theatrical release. The film was selected for the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, for the dramatic category, and Arthur Jafa won the award for cinematography.
Dash first had the idea for Daughters of the Dust in 1975, and originally conceived of it as a short film with no dialogue. The story was projected to be the same, of a Gullah family participating in the Great Migration at the turn of the century, inspired by Dash's father's family's experience. After shopping a short version of the film around to studios, Dash secured funding from PBS' American Playhouse, and made the film for $800,000. She cast peers from black independent cinema of the time, and set to work filming primarily on St. Helena Island and Hunting Island off the coast of South Carolina. Shooting took 28 days.
The film went to Sundance and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. When it was released generally, it received almost universal acclaim, with critics praising its visual palette and unique, non-linear approach to storytelling. In spite of its success, Dash did not find further success in Hollywood, a conundrum that she blamed on systemic exclusion. The legacy of the film, however, remains one of acclaim among film buffs and critics. In a retrospective article about the film, critic Richard Brody wrote in an article for The New Yorker, "To look at the trivial films that won Oscars for 1991 and compare them with “Daughters of the Dust,” a movie made outside Hollywood on a scant budget, is to laugh at the shortsightedness and money-centered vanity of the movie industry and the critics who are in thrall to it...Dash hasn’t made another theatrical feature; the loss to history—in artistic vistas, personal influence, and career opportunities—is as grievous as the near-oblivion into which the film itself nearly sank. This movie about history ought to have been understood, in its time, as historic; the only consolation is in the long game."
