Overrated

One of the best films i have seen

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.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

As one of the extras who had the opportunity to be apart of this production, i found it to be very educational and it was truly a learning experience for me. This was the first movie I ever appeared in so I was truly on cloud nine as I was doing everything the directors were asking me to do. During the filming of this movie I was already apart of a group called The Hallelujah Singers whose purpose was (and still is) to seek to preserve through music the Gullah heritage, rooted in West African traditions and language, brought by the slaves to the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. this movie gave me more insight into what it was the group was doing. Again, just being apart of this movie was great and very educational for me.

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

I really enjoyed this movie. Its been a few years since I've seen it and I saw it twice. As a matter of fact, I'll rent it again or buy it if I can. No plot (I don't get the other poster comments). The movie was about a family and every day life as I saw it. I enjoyed it because it was pleasant, no guns, no thugs (lol), just a simple movie about a family and a group of people I knew nothing about. I still want to visit that area in South Carolina one day. I also enjoyed the movie because the actors are not well known actors in my eyes. I get tired of seeing the same actors in movies. I will do some research on the Gullah (sp) people.

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.