Film With Artist Talk: Julie Dash and “Daughters of the Dust”

The Committee on African and African American Studies will present a talk by filmmaker Julie Dash, followed by a screening of her film “Daughters of the Dust” at 3 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 29, in the DeBoest Lecture Hall of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 4000 N. Michigan Road. The event is free of charge.

Dash embarked on her film career in 1973 and now is one of the foremost female American filmmakers. She became the first African-American woman to have a full-length general theatrical release with the debut of “Daughters of the Dust.”

The Gullah culture of the coastal islands of the American South has its roots in ancient Yoruba traditions, which were brought to this country by enslaved West Africans. This community is poetically summoned in “Daughters of the Dust” (1992, 112 min.), a drama about the Peazant family, in which “ancestors already dead also seem to be as present as the living,” wrote Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. The family experiences conflicts about religion, industrialization and moving north, while the matriarch Nana holds true to the beliefs of their ancestors. Narrated by the spirit of an unborn child, the film reads like mesmerizing, ghostly elegy.

This event is co-sponsored by the Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive.

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