It's tough to sort my feelings on Daughters of the Dust. The film is built around a compelling and often forgotten segment of black history that maintains social resonance beyond its time and place; director Julie Dash deserves credit for capturing the emotion and pain of cultural transformation, and there are lovely images throughout. But Daughters of the Dust makes very little effort to engage the audience: it's difficult to maintain a sense of each character's individual goals, and the film often sacrifices narrative momentum for visual poetry. Unfortunately, I'm left with a film that interests me more in theory than in practice. -TK 9/30/10

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.

Besides being visually gorgeous to look at, I am having trouble finding positive things to say about Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust. My biggest problem with understanding Daughters of the Dust was the continuity. Obviously there was no change of costume, there was only the one meal, and no one ever seemed to have slept, so this would make me think that it all takes place in one day. However, because of the poor continuity in editing, when the film was over I really found myself guessing what was going on. It must have been difficult shooting where they did, St. Helena Island, and with a smaller budget, but the frequent change of sunlight really threw me off. I'm not just talking about the storm scenes, but towards the end of the film it seems like they had trouble with clouds moving in and out. It also seemed like some of the last shots were edited together without paying much attention to the lighting changes. Also, along with continuity editing, characters disappeared and reappeared extremely infrequently. For example, the American Indian that was seeing Iona just took off towards the beginning of the film, and we don't see him again until the last few minutes of the film. He was obviously not a main character of the film, but are we really supposed to feel something when Iona runs off with someone we have little/no feeling for? It wasn't just this side story that we were given little insight into, but all characters. Instead of letting us deep inside of fewer characters and their lives, we were exposed to several characters, and we were given very little insight into who they were. This kept the film very shallow and somewhat meaningless for me. I couldn't find any sort of central plot. There were several little sub plots, that didn't go very far, and all ended with the splitting of the family into those who stayed on the island and those who went to the mainland. And then we're cut off. All we know is they never see each other again. So, we're given little to no plot, no deep or meaningful insight into the characters, and a rather abrupt and unsatisfying ending. I'd argue that Daughters of the Dust is a poetic film before ever calling it a narrative. The film had a poetic feel to it, with the beautiful scenery, the language used, and especially the music. That (horrible) harp music that was constantly repeated over and over again could be interpreted as poetic. However, the African tribal music that was used was also very poetic sounding, exotic and rhythmically speaking.

I saw this film for a film class at UF. We have seen some slow and some fast-paced films. This is by far the slowest we have seen and is the most boring piece of cinema I have ever seen.Now, it's not ALL bad. The movie has some cultural significance and was obviously researched before filming. The shot selection was very good, colors vibrant, and you could feel the actors' emotions.But the story... was slow. There's a load of characters and I couldn't figure out who was related to who and what all had happened with the pregnant woman. The movie was like the opening title-card sequence to Black Hawk Down stretched out to 2 hours in length. There's parts with loads of music and no dialogue and vice versa. The movie seemed to reach an ending 5 times before it finally did. The writer-director clearly had no clue as to what pacing was.The story was basically about some African-Americans at the turn of the century who boat down to their family on the shores of some island that is separated on one side by a river and the ocean on the other. They want a better life and are split about whether the island or the mainland is the better spot for it. It takes them two agonizing (to us) hours to decide.Long [very long] story short: half the class walked out in the first hour. And I was jealous of those who did when I reached the end of the film. 2/10