Julie Dash's DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST

 

Daughters of the Dust isn't created and executed in a style that, from what I experienced, is in any conventional style.  This doesn't mean that Julie Dash, the writer and director, doesn't know how or doesn't create conflicts for the people she's assembled here.  On the contrary, there is a very clear problem established early on in the film, where this family set is going to leave this island where the Gullah people have stayed and thrived and become a succinct community over the years.  This comes into opposition of the elder of the family, played by Cora Lee Day (or she may just look to be the oldest, though everyone looks up to and listens to her, even if they may quietly or to themselves disagree), and that she isn't planning on leaving with them. 

What about their memories?  The roots they have to this place?  Moreover, the roots that they've held on to for so many years that have the richness of Africa, but also the trauma and constant bite that comes with being Black in America (with slavery being not a distant memory but very immediate, like when characters create a little makeshift plaque showing when they were freed in the 1860s).  Daughters of the Dust does show us this family - and whether they're family-friends or how everyone is completely related doesn't matter so much as the feeling they've created a tight knight group, and what is family or a collective if not that) - in a directly poetic and meditative stylistic approach.  

These aren't a series of scenes so much as a series of stanzas, where the director as poet is crafting through her lush and tough and soul-stirring grammar with camera, cutting and the choice of composer (this alternately feels like the deep peace one might feel during a massage, while other times it feels like one's soul is broiling with hurt and fear and ache and always love), and it's nothing if not memorable and impressive for that. 

I can't say my mind didn't wander in one or two of these passages, since there is a lot of time spent in the film just watching these women being around one another, sometimes talking while hanging around great big trees, or cooking food, or laying on a beach.  It's probably the most Hang-Out of a tone-poem I've seen that made it into the Sight & Sound top list of critics and directors, but that's not a negative necessarily.  My more obstinate critical part of my mind tells me that a good five minutes could be trimmed, but where that would be is impossible to figure; it all feels of a piece with itself, like pulling apart (forgive this language) an intricate quilt of warm and dark and damaged emotions. 

 These women (and the men as well, but if Dash's heart is with any of these people the most it's the women) have longed and suffered and persevered and created a hardness often to shield against the shit of the world, and I always believed what they were expressing and going through, and their discussions about what is to come next, what has come in the past, feels organic to their lived experiences.  And the camera and editing heighten the content we have.  It's cinema as prayer (if I prayed more I'd understand, which I don't but strangely this makes me get why so many do), where the technique mirrors what one is pining for a struggling with and how, most relatable, we can feel like we are going nuts by what family expects of us and how painful it can be to pull away from that.  

As unique and (to people kept or continue to be ignorant of other cultures) immersive experience as this is, if anything this strangely reminded me of Women Talking, another film that features a community weighing the pros and cons of what to do next and the metric tons of weight on their psyches from what they've experienced. Only difference for me is that this is less didactic than that film, and Dash embraces a warm color palette (how could she not given that island with all of its trees and greenery and the beaches and waves and the great looking food) and the drama of the moment is balanced by joy and harmony.