Daughters of the Dust

The Sea Islands of Georgia, described by filmmaker Julie Dash as a kind of "Ellis Island for Africans," is the beautiful and haunting setting for this tale of three generations of Gullah women in the Peazant family. Dash limns the bonds and strains between the ancestral mothers who were brought as slaves to St. Helena Island in the 18th century, and their children's children who, longing for the pleasures and freedom of modernity, restlessly prepare to "pass over" to the North in the year 1902.