- When I found out that Beyonce's "Lemonade"
had some elements of "Daughters of the Dust",
my website shut down,
and then I started getting all these phone calls and emails.
"Have you seen it?"
People started asking me...
[stammers]
"Were you offended or anything?"
I was like, "No!" [chuckles]
"Are you kidding?"
Hi, Vogue.
I'm Julie Dash, and I'm here to talk to you about my film
"Daughters of the Dust".
[girls clapping] [soft music]
[film reel clicking]
I started studying film doing the Blaxploitation period.
When I was in high school, as I say,
I started going to the Studio Museum of Harlem,
and studying cinematography.
Later, when I was in undergraduate school at CCNY,
a pilot program called the Leonard Davis Center
for the Performing Arts was started.
So I decided to change my major and major in film.
I relocated out to Los Angeles.
I wrote and directed a film called "Illusions" in 1982.
I think I did another film, short film called "Four Women".
But all the time I'd been writing and perfecting,
and making a trailer for "Daughters of the Dust",
and then eventually we were able to raise $800,000.
[camera shutter clicking]
- [Man] Nana, she carried them with her for generations.
- Daughters of the dust is about a African American family,
about the women who are the carriers
of their traditions and belief.
And it's a family dinner that takes place
the night before they migrate north.
I was very much excited by the opportunity
to depict African American women,
or women from the African diaspora,
in a way that was different
from what I was seeing on television at the time,
or what I was seeing in the movies
with the Blaxploitation films.
I always felt that other,
the stories of others were told
with such elegance and grace,
and our stories were just kind of like, brutal.
And so, I was determined to reimagine
how we are on the screen in historical drama,
as well as contemporary life
in a way that showed respect for my family
and for the community from which I came, you know?
[camera shutter clicking]
The costumes were very, very particular for me.
And one of the things that we did with the costumes,
what I wanted was
to have the costumes indicate to the viewer the time period
and where these women were in their lives
and how this family functioned on this island.
So I made sure that all of the costumes
were 10 to 15 years older
than the 1902 time period in which it's set.
They were like Gibson girl, white dresses.
But if you know anything about the Gibson girl dresses,
they were hand me downs.
In the late 1800s,
Gibson girl dress was just something
that was fashionable and in Sears catalogs.
So then you know that there was some contact
with the outside world, with wealthier families
who handed these things down,
and these women wore it on special days.
It was also important for me to show that African Americans
are not always wearing the same old,
the clothing that they wear
when they're doing agricultural work,
because that's usually what we see.
It was also important that I indicate that the Nana Peazant,
the family matriarch,
that she's not wearing one of these white dresses.
She's wearing a dress
that's dyed in indigo blue specifically,
because that was the cash crop that they worked on
when she was growing up.
The color indigo, it's very important,
and remains very important to the Gullah Geechee people
'cause it was not only a cash crop in the colonies.
It was also technology and agriculture
that they brought with them from West Africa,
the process, the planting, harvesting,
and processing of indigo.
And so that's something that we still see today,
painted on the windows and framing houses, the color indigo.
It's just very special and very powerful, very magical.
The wardrobe team, they were fantastic.
We had several things that were built in Savannah,
like Yellow Mary's dress was made handmade in Savannah.
The most important thing about the costumes were,
we had to age them
because it's very difficult to shoot white
on black skin tones.
And we didn't want that contrast out there
especially because the sun was so bright,
and the sand was so bright white,
and with the bright white dresses,
it would've been, you know, catastrophic.
So everything was like, dipped in,
they call it dipped in tea
but really, it was dipped in dye
to bring down the whiteness
and make it appear more aesthetically pleasing to the eye
on the dark skin tones.
Between myself and Kerry James Marshall,
who was our production designer,
we worked very hard on establishing a look,
creating a world that was unlike any world
that had been seen before on the screen.
The costumes were from actual photographs
that were held at the Penn Center:
photographs of women in white dresses
having lunch on the beach.
They also wore hats, but we could not afford the hats.
[chuckles] We ran out of money.
[camera shutter clicking]
We submitted to Sundance and they accepted it.
It was in the competition.
We won for best cinematography,
and we assumed that we would get distribution right away,
but we did not get distribution.
It wasn't until one year later,
and it was released to theaters in 1992.
It just never occurred to me until someone said,
"Well, you're the first Black woman"
"to get a major theatrical release."
It was kind of bittersweet
because it was like, this is 1992.
There were some distributors
who didn't even want to talk about it.
They wanted to see what they normally see, you know,
in Black people, in situations, and in locations
where they were recognizable from previous films.
And at the time, you know,
Black youth films, you know
male-oriented, dominated youth films were being made,
and they wanted to see something more hip-hop.
And I was actually told by, you know,
one distributor that my film was not authentic
like the other films were.
In terms of depicting African Americans on a screen,
it was mostly stories about antebellum,
slavery period, and all of that,
or what I call the urban testosterone films.
We had this hunger, you know,
to see ourselves as complicated people living our lives
and everything didn't have to do
with racial oppression or civil rights.
I did not know the way I was dressing the characters
in "Daughters of the Dust"
would be surprising or shocking to most.
Some people would say they were just absolutely offended.
Daily Variety said that
it looked like a Laura Ashley commercial
because of the white dresses,
and then that, right there.
you could just see that's the biased attitude.
It's like why,
if you're thinking of having black women depicted
at the turn of this century,
they have no right to be wearing a white dress
blowing in the wind, in the sand.
They need to have a pitchfork and a hoe.
They were saying, you know,
like, "Black people don't wear white dresses like that."
You know, "Why didn't they have on"
"a playa dress or something?"
And that just goes to show you that
we see so much of the same thing over and over in television
and in motion pictures.
Not so much now, as it was 30 years ago
[camera shutter clicking]
"Daughters of the Dust" has had a long life. [chuckles]
And so I'm very happy, all very happy about that.
I've had a lot of comments from a lot of young filmmakers
who say, you know, it was one of the first Black films
that they've seen like that,
that even though they didn't understand it,
they can't get it out of their mind.
When I found out that Beyonce's "Lemonade"
had some elements of "Daughters of the Dust",
my website shut down,
and then I started getting all these phone calls and emails.
"Have you seen it?"
And at that time, I had to get a link.
Like I was in awe, it was beautiful.
I just watched it.
My mouth was open agape,
and I was just watched this whole thing for 40 minutes.
It was like, my heart was beating so hard.
It was so good.
And then, the interesting thing was then,
people started asking me,
[stammers]
"Were you offended or anything?"
It was like, "No!" [chuckles]
Are you kidding?
I went to art school. [chuckles]
We don't get, with that, we love stuff like that.
It's like, you know,
next generation takes your stuff and repurposes it.
And that's the whole meaning of telling stories.
There's a continuum of ideas that build on projects.
There's nothing that's like, totally, totally original.
And I've told people many times
that my tree scene was homage to "Ganja & Hess",
with Dr. Hess sitting in their legs swinging.
I've been influenced and informed
by other pieces of artwork
that kind of speak to that time period.
I think "Daughters of the Dust"
has had the impact that it's had because it's different,
because it went beyond the comfort zone of most,
because it introduced Gullah Geechee culture
to the mainstream African American culture,
because we dared to light it in a certain way,
AJ's lighting,
because Kerry James Marshall's production design
was so authentic and confounding,
and the music of John Barnes.
So I think it was a combination of all of these things
that make it, still make it kind of an interesting film
to look back at.
[soft music]