Film: Daughters of the Dust

Yale FIlm Archive: Sundance Revisited Film Series

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991, 35mm, 113 mins)

Dash conjures the story of three generations of Gullah women on an island off the South Carolina coast in the first feature film by an African American woman to get national theatrical distribution and the first selected for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Her luminous masterpiece’s "impressionistic look at the Great Migration (who will go, who will stay, and at what cost?) combines a corporeal sense of history with poetic, often indirect and allegorical underpinnings” (Durga Chew-Bose). A singular meditation on heritage, identity, and the power of cultural memory. Introduction by Erin Montanez. 35mm print from the Yale Film Archive.

Sundance Revisited features a selection of films from our collection that had their American or world premieres at the festival.

Yale Film Archive screenings are always free and open to the public. See the full film schedule here.