Steineded How sad is this?

JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Ted 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

shaka-mcglotten This is one of the finest black films of the last twenty years. Julie Dash has created an evocative portrait of African American life that still holds an African past in the cradle of everyday life. The film is also a brilliant depiction of gender relations in black communities. Daughters of the Dust presents a vital, spiritual, and haunting portrait of black women, their agency and their connection to a nurturing ancestral past. Very few films about black people seriously explore the deep spiritual connections between Old and New World, and fewer still look so carefully at a particular community. The Gullah people of the Sea Islands are a group that remains largely unknown in both mainstream and black culture. As group that has clearly adapted to life in a new place, they still demonstrate powerful connections to an African past. In their adaptation and connection, they show the strength and resilience of black communities and cultures.

bigrichry I am taken with stories of the undeveloped and developing peoples and would have liked to learn of the Gullah culture. I did my best to follow this mishmash for 45 minutes. It seems to have several dialects that would be impossible to close caption and completely unintelligible as it is. Only a rare person would get anything from it.It appears to start with a black preacher and his wife appearing on the scene where a black woman hidden behind a fluffy white object is approaching accompanied by an attractive light-skinned woman. As the lighting changes, some of the characters appear to shift from Caucasian to Negroid. I have no idea of what happened while I attempted to watch with my wife who has very good hearing and diction and could make no sense of it either.I didn't attempt to watch the last half.

tcdarkness I saw this film for a film class at UF. We have seen some slow and some fast-paced films. This is by far the slowest we have seen and is the most boring piece of cinema I have ever seen.Now, it's not ALL bad. The movie has some cultural significance and was obviously researched before filming. The shot selection was very good, colors vibrant, and you could feel the actors' emotions.But the story... was slow. There's a load of characters and I couldn't figure out who was related to who and what all had happened with the pregnant woman. The movie was like the opening title-card sequence to Black Hawk Down stretched out to 2 hours in length. There's parts with loads of music and no dialogue and vice versa. The movie seemed to reach an ending 5 times before it finally did. The writer-director clearly had no clue as to what pacing was.The story was basically about some African-Americans at the turn of the century who boat down to their family on the shores of some island that is separated on one side by a river and the ocean on the other. They want a better life and are split about whether the island or the mainland is the better spot for it. It takes them two agonizing (to us) hours to decide.Long [very long] story short: half the class walked out in the first hour. And I was jealous of those who did when I reached the end of the film. 2/10