Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)

Alva Rogers, Trula Hoosier, and Barbarao in Daughters of the Dust

Cast: Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbarao, Trula Hoosier, Umar Abdurrahamn, Adisa Anderson, Kaycee Moore, Bahni Turpin, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, Tommy Redmond Hicks, Tony King, Cornell Royal, Vertamae Grosvenor. Screenplay: Julie Dash. Cinematography: Arthur Jafa. Production design: Kerry Marshall. Film editing: Joseph Burton, Amy Carey. Music: John Barnes.

The Great Migration, the movement northward of Black Americans in the 20th century, was one of the most unreported major stories of its day, and it's only in hindsight that authors and filmmakers have been able to re-create the immense cultural upheaval that it represents. Julie Dash does it in the most intimate and delicate way possible, by letting us meet the Peazant family on the eve of their departure from the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia for an unknown future in the North. It's one of those films that need a solid grounding in American history, and particularly in the history of Black people in America, to be fully appreciated, for Dash throws us into the lives of the Peazant family and the centuries of tradition, religion, and oppression that they embody, not to teach us about these things, but to spur us to learn. The film was originally released without subtitles to aid the viewer's comprehension of the dialogue, spoken in the Gullah dialect, and though I'm happy to have that help now, the beauty of the setting and the faces in it communicate nearly as much as the words. It's a film about the ability to endure and prevail, as Faulkner might have put it.