Daughters of the dust

Dash's film is set among the Gullah people of Georgia's Sea Islands, used as an entry point in the 18th and 19th centuries for incoming slave ships. Isolated from the large plantations controlled by white slaveowners, the Gullah or Geechee people retained the customs and belief systems of their African forebears. In this turn-of-the-century drama, Viola Peazant, a missionary on the mainland, returns to her ancestral home to guide family members to a new life in the North. Vehemently opposed to this migration, is the formidable matriarch, Nana Peazant who believes that the family will be diluted of its memory and strength if it is so dispersed. Her ally in this attitude is Yellow Mary, a world-weary traveler, who has retreated to this island refuge from a hostile, intolerant world. Through the interviews of the photographer Snead, the legends and rituals of Ibo belief mesh with those of Islam and Christianity and surface in dreamlike sequences. Bridging the past with the present is the character of the Unborn Child who embodies both the expanse of collective memory and future promise. (Circulates).

Daughters of the Dust is set in 1902 among the members of the Peazant family, Gullah islanders who live at Ibo Landing on St. Simons Island, off the Georgia coast. Their ancestors were brought there as enslaved people centuries ago, and the islanders developed a language and culture that was creolized from West Africans of Ibo, Yoruba, Kikongo, Mende, and Twi origin.