With Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash became the first black female filmmaker whose film received a general theatrical release in American film history. Having come out of the L.A. Rebellion film movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Dash turned to narrative filmmaking to great success with Daughters, which staged a fictionalized homage to her father's Gullah heritage. The story is deeply personal and uniquely told, and the film earned Dash a great deal of critical favor.
Dash began working on the story of the film in 1975, but the film would not go into production until 1988. After shopping it around to several studios that all passed, Dash secured funding from PBS and began filming. She was strongly influenced by black women writers and wanted to put the kinds of unique narratives written by novelists like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker onscreen. In a short video about the making of the film, Dash describes how the structure of the film came about: "I decided to let the story unravel itself in a way in which an African griot would tell the story, since that’s part of our tradition,” Ms. Dash said in the short. “So the story kind of unfolds throughout this day and a half, in various vignettes. It unfolds, comes back, it unfolds and it comes back.”
Critics adored the film, even though Dash struggled to find other film funding and could never secure an agent. In his retrospective profile of the film, Richard Brody wrote for The New Yorker, "Dash’s detail-filled microhistorical sequences undo the deceptive clarity of fixed categories and encyclopedic formulas, such as “the Great Migration” itself, by rediscovering the richness of the phenomena that they encapsulate in the dense tangle of individuals’ experiences."
Dash wrote two books about her experience working on the film, one a retrospective on the making of the film written in collaboration with Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks, and the other a sequel to the film.
