In 1902, an African-American family living on a sea island off the coast of South Carolina prepares to move to the North.
Thankfully, it's not exactly The Color Purple^WIndigo…
Richard Linklater released Slacker in [1991] and has made fifteen features since then; some of them are excellent, but neither Slacker nor any of the others can hold a candle to the inventiveness of Daughters of the Dust.
— Richard Brody (The New Yorker, 2015)
Unlike conventional accounts of the past that often lean on claims of verisimilitude for their cultural clout, Daughters of the Dust roundly rebukes any such possibility of authenticity. In turn, such a move away from trying to serve as a replication of the historical record makes the film as much about Dash herself, whose rejection by Hollywood throughout the 1980s made the project’s realization unachievable. […] Dash chose to represent the past enslavement of her elder characters through their hands, which are permanently stained a hue of blue. The film abounds in this sort of detail, imbuing it with a sense of hyperreal poetry that’s head-spinning, and, for the uninitiated, potentially baffling.
— Clayton Dillard and Chuck Bowen (Slant)
