Daughters of the Dust is fictional, but inspired by Dash’s own family history it feels deeply personal.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

An amazing first feature by director-writer Julie Dash.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Apr 10, 2023

Submerges viewers in another place and another time.

Full Review | Aug 17, 2022

The storyline is complex and submerged, but the pattern sharply etched, the more so by the compelling images of the Peazant family.

Full Review | Jul 11, 2022

Decades later, the film has lost none of its importance or appeal.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 10, 2022

...the film is created with many voices that weave and join with the other passages of history...

Full Review | Oct 5, 2021

The visual beauty of Daughters is evident throughout, while the difficult narrative sneaks up on you.

Full Review | Mar 23, 2021

Writer-producer-director Julie Dash has taken extraordinary risks. The movie develops and grows and swells into something remarkable and alive, like an idea or a feeling or a child in the womb.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 23, 2021

Let's thank Julie Dash for her persistence in bringing us this jewel. This is a story we will tell our children again and again -- and with each retelling, the colors will swell in our souls.

Full Review | Mar 23, 2021

An Atlanta-based artist making her long-worked-for feature debut, Ms. Dash is a filmmaker of startling originality and delicacy. Her film is poetry in motion, part dream-memory, part tattered family album.

Full Review | Mar 23, 2021

The film rewards the patient viewer who succumbs to its trancelike spell and understands that the movie is about the rhythms and rituals of a culture remembered.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 23, 2021

Dash's film is as much a visual experience as an aural one. She is a film-maker whose passion for her subject permeates very frame.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 23, 2021

Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust offers so much to admire, it's too bad its occasional lack of clarity and meandering style weaken its impact.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 23, 2021

[Dash's] refusal to spend much time establishing characters or expiating their conflicts makes this more like a stroll through a exhibition of sepia photographs than a full blooded drama.

Full Review | Mar 23, 2021

If Daughters of the Dust is deceptively simple in its story and characterizations it is an overwhelmingly rich sensory experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 23, 2021

It's a true original and, as such, of considerable value both as a film and as a sad yet hopeful summation of history as memory and experience.

Full Review | Mar 23, 2021

Julie Dash is a talented film-maker; her movie (photographed by Arthur Jaffa) is full of haunted and haunting images. The narrative, how ever, is infuriatingly, wilfully obscure, the overall effect soporific rather than hypnotic.

Full Review | Mar 23, 2021

Stories are told, beliefs expounded, wrapped in photography of uncommon splendour. A shorter running time would probably help, though the film still deserves applause as a ravishing visual exhumation of a vanished world.

Full Review | Mar 23, 2021

Daughters is like a fresh ocean breeze on a hot summer day.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Mar 23, 2021

A beautifully filmed historical drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 23, 2021