Very best movie i ever watch

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Most of the other comments have described what I loved about the film. It's one of my all-time favorites. I may have had an advantage - having just returned from a year in Jamaica when I first saw the film - the language was understandable to me without the subtitles most of the time. I have to say - I don't understand the folks that didn't get it. This film spoke to something deep inside me...something that perhaps all women share, whatever their background or color. Yes, it deepens ones understanding of a particular time and of a particular culture...but for me it goes way beyond that. I can only say, if you haven't seen it, rent it - decide for yourself. You'll thank me :).

This is one of the finest black films of the last twenty years. Julie Dash has created an evocative portrait of African American life that still holds an African past in the cradle of everyday life. The film is also a brilliant depiction of gender relations in black communities. Daughters of the Dust presents a vital, spiritual, and haunting portrait of black women, their agency and their connection to a nurturing ancestral past. Very few films about black people seriously explore the deep spiritual connections between Old and New World, and fewer still look so carefully at a particular community. The Gullah people of the Sea Islands are a group that remains largely unknown in both mainstream and black culture. As group that has clearly adapted to life in a new place, they still demonstrate powerful connections to an African past. In their adaptation and connection, they show the strength and resilience of black communities and cultures.

Daughters of the Dust is film that slits the eyes of spectators who have been fed only linear and simplistic narrative/plot dev'ts through hollywoodism and can't possibly fathom any other way of being/thinking. It is truly an excruciating film to watch for those who have not dreamt and lived the "double consciousness" of modernity, for those who do NOT want to recall and remember the fact of american quilombos, maroon societies, slave revolters and runaways who succesfully established another way of life, not based on european dominance. This story is about the struggles of maintaining that community in 1902, a turning point in the life of this one maroon society. Dash breaks with cinematic codes in her experimental reconstruction of historical memory...a forgotten episode in African american history, a forgotten place, re-calling back to life ancestors that had survived and thrived: The Gullahs, Peazant family, persisting, unerasable, as the unborn child running through our memory, coming out of our past, forging a new and alternative future: a future that rejects the limitations of western epistemology. The summoning of these images to screen from the unwritten (african) past provides its own logic and development which Dash successfully visualizes in a polyphonic tradition, many voices, multiple perspectives. She does not allow a simplistic and individualistic rendering of this history...NO!she allows the struggle of divergent african perspectives, Christian, Muslim, Africanist, Native American to emerge in the same frame, to address that age old question: To exist or not to exist, to bear witness or to forget. In order for this history to exist and bear witness, Julie Dash does not allow any conventional reductionary scheme of narrativity, her temporal references are not linear. Her story is told through palimpestic time, the past present and future, overlapping and disjunctive: rupturing our understanding of history/memory and identity. The conflict that drives the film's narrative is not individual ego/conventional good vs bad drama/or boy gets girl(Hollywoodism); the conflict is how will the communal memory of these African survivors be salvaged from the ravaging of modernism's erasure..We see the family eat their last supper as the rite of passage to a life on the other side, a side that the ancestors fought to diverge from...The film is testimony to the african ancestors and to the spirit of resistance of slave revolters. Many people have offered criticism of dash's "feminism." Feminism is a problematic concept to apply to this film, no it is not feminist, it is afro-centric, matri-focal, and woman, as bearer of culture and memory as mother to the community, becomes the embodiment of that struggle. (of course it is not "feminist": it doesn't speak about abortion law, equal pay, etc etc..this kind of feminism is eurocentric and simplistic..) Thank you Julie Dash, i am not african american but the tears poured down my face as i, too, recalled that life left behind, another time another place. A place where people, muslims/christians/indigenous or any other can actually co-exist peacefully side by side, respectful of each other's differences. The character who chose to leave her so called "civilized" mother at the last minute, to take off with her Native American lover..is one of the most powerful onscreen testimony of love between indigenous peoples that has ever been made.

Daughters of the DustJulie Dashes film Daughters of the Dust attempts to show the struggles of African Americans who's ancestors had been brought to a west Indian island. The scenery is beautiful as one could imagine having been filmed on a tropical paradise. The shots of the beach and ocean as well as further inland are amazing. Dash draws attention to this by on at least two occasions placing people in the trees for their dialogue scenes, the Cherokee and yellow Mary each have scenes in which they are sitting in trees. Also the colors that are used in some scenes, such as the blue tinting of the ocean when the little girl is running across the beach, enhance the image. In one very nice shot the camera is flying over what looks like a big sand bar that is protruding from the edge of the island. So successful is Dash at showing the beauty of the island that through out most of the film I found myself wishing that I was on it. However that might have something to do with her failure to construct an interesting story to go along with the eye-catching island landscape. The story is told through the recollection of a young girl who isn't born yet, she's telling the past as it was told to her. This along with the written heading at the beginning of the film initially give the film a documentary type feel. However the plot of the film move from there to become a one sided look at this family's existence on the island. One sided not in the sense that we don't get any male role models and in fact no males role is well defined. In her painstaking attempt at showing each of the females' roles on the island Dash forgets that the men probably had some part to play in the way of life of the family. For instance the cameraman in the movie is not even close to being anything other than a distraction. Is he the boyfriend of the Christian woman or just her cameraman? If he is just the cameraman why does he seem to have more than that as his driving force and if he is her boyfriend why does she introduce him as the cameraman? This may seem trivial but in a movie where the roles of men are unclear, it would be nice to have at least one man who isn't just an onlooker. The same can be said about the main island man. He seems to be at the mercy of his wife as well as the old mystic lady. Both of which seem to only confuse and agitate him. Even after the cameraman asks about the man who had been brought by the slave ship as a boy, the Christian lady says that he's crazy and implies that he isn't worth talking to. When the cameraman does talk to him he seems far from crazy but still we don't get to hear his story, at least not convincingly. The closest thing to any male authority is when the husband of the woman who was raped gets into a weird fight like thing with a mysterious man who has no role in the move other than that one confrontation. No society either on an island or on a mountain can survive without all of it's members playing an important role. In this movie the men had no role.It is worth saying that if in fact the film is ment to take place over the period of only one day the filmmaker could get around having to show the roles of the men in her focus on the women's duties that day. If that is the case and this was to be just one day, then in that aspect she also failed as that was not evident to me.