Reimagining the Black Diaspora: Daughters of The Dust

Dir. Julie Dash
1991, USA, 113 min
2K Restoration

Languid look at the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, where African folk-ways were maintained well into the 20th Century and was one of the last bastions of these mores in America.

* Join us on February 12 for a virtual discussion with Sarah-Tai Black. Sarah-Tai is a film programmer, arts curator, and critic who was born and (mostly) raised in Treaty 13 Territory/Toronto. They are a non-binary femme of Afro-Brazilian, Chinese, and European settler ancestry whose creative efforts work to center embodied Black, queer, trans, and crip futurities. They are interested in art and space making that inspires immediate, all-encompassing feeling, speaks back to conventional ways of seeing and being seen, and experiments counter to presupposed boundaries of form and structure. Sarah-Tai regularly contributes film criticism to The Globe and Mail and The Los Angeles Times and has written for platforms such as Berlinale Forum, Cinema Scope, MUBI Notebook, and CBC Arts, as well as alongside several artist projects. They currently work as International Mid-Length Programmer at Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival; they are also a selected participant in McMaster Museum of Art’s 2022-2023 Curatorial Mentorship Program working under the guidance of curator Pamela Edmonds with support from Canadian Heritage.

Understanding what it means to encompass various parts of our identity through the act of remembering is one that is often complicated by the loss of generational knowledge. This consciousness is often passed down by ancestors but can be removed or erased from certain communities. The prioritization of western ways of mythology for the Black diaspora is asking of us to reanalyze what it means for the diaspora to have access to their autonomy of self-actualization of spirituality. The films in this series examine what it means to recollect histories and the ways we can conceptualize mythology.

Reimagining the Black Diaspora: Spirituality, Mythology and Collective Memory is generously sponsored by IATSE 856 Manitoba.

Writer-producer-director Julie Dash has taken extraordinary risks. The movie develops and grows and swells into something remarkable and alive, like an idea or a feeling or a child in the womb.

– Judy Gerstel, Detroit Free Press

Let’s thank Julie Dash for her persistence in bringing us this jewel. This is a story we will tell our children again and again — and with each retelling, the colors will swell in our souls.

– Patricia Smith, Boston Globe