Event

Daughters Of The Dust

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.

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 resonates today in the canon of African American and feminist cinema, and most recently as a major in influence on Beyoncés video album Lemonade. Restored by Cohen Media Group (in conjunction with UCLA) for the first time with proper color grading overseen by cinematographer AJ Jafa, audiences can finally see the film exactly as Julie Dash intended.

"Its a movie that runs less than two hours and feels like three or fournot in sitting time but in substance, in historical scope and depth of emotion, in the number of characters it brings to life and the novelistic subtlety of the connections between them, in the profusion of its ideas and the cinematic imagination with which theyre realized, in the sensuous beauty of its images and sounds and the indelibly exalted gestures that it impresses on ones memory." - Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Daughters of the Dust Re-Released Following Attention from Beyoncé: Story on NPR