daughters of the dust

That there’s a fair chance you’ve never seen Daughters of the Dust — full disclosure: I am among these people — should be taken as a failure of distribution and exposure, not the film’s quality and impact. There’s also a fair chance that the closest you’ve really come to Julie Dash‘s 1991 film is Beyoncé’s Lemonade, which paid a direct visual tribute that, according to the helmer herself, sped along Cohen Media Group’s ongoing restoration — and, today, we have the trailer for said restoration in advance of its unveiling this fall.

Speaking to the New York Times, Cohen’s Tim Lanza explained a bit why this effort means a great deal. More than the somewhat-standard order of business that is working from an original print to improve A/V qualities, it provides a long-missing color-grading and, per Dash and cinematographer Arthur Jafa‘s wishes, is set on “capturing the variety of African-American skin tones.” A taste of this can be found in the preview, which sometimes gives the impression of looking upon a film made in the last 15 years, not 25. After decades of what’s essentially semi-obscurity, Daughters of the Dust may soon become something of an event.

Watch it below:

At the dawn of the 20th century, a multigenerational family in the Gullah community in the Sea Islands off of South Carolina — former West African slaves who adopted many of their ancestors’ Yoruba traditions — suffers a generational split. An older group of sisters return after migrating north to New York with intentions of bringing the rest of their family back across the water to the mainland with them. But, tensions arrive when the newly Americanized sisters view their homeland’s way of living as backwards, all while Nana, the family elder who embodies the traditions and folklore of their African roots, is struggling to keep the family together and to pass on the knowledge of their ancestors.
 daughters of the dust

Daughters of the Dust will begin its new run on November 18.

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