Julie Dash Made a Movie. Then Hollywood Shut Her Out

                                        

TORONTO — One day late in April, the filmmaker Julie Dash got a phone call from her daughter. “Welcome to the BeyHive,” her daughter said. “What are you talking about?” Ms. Dash replied.

Beyoncé had just dropped her visual album, “Lemonade,” a luscious tone poem and lover’s revenge fantasy featuring prominent black women and girls. In its mood and imagery — women wearing gauzy white gowns, wading through water, perching in a mossy tree — savvy viewers identified a deep influence: Ms. Dash’s 1991 film, “Daughters of the Dust.”

Warmly received and lavishly praised for its beauty and dreamlike narrative, “Daughters” tells the tale of Gullah women on the Sea Islands off the Southeastern United States in the early 1900s who are tugged north by the Great Migration. It was the first feature film by an African-American woman to have a wide release, an achievement sullied only by the icy reception that Hollywood gave Ms. Dash, back then and pretty much ever since.

It took Beyoncé (who has not met the filmmaker and whose representative could not confirm the film’s influence on “Lemonade”) and her BeyHive of followers to bring “Daughters” renewed and wider renown, and it came at an auspicious time for Ms. Dash. The movie, which is listed in the National Film Registry, has been digitally restored by its new distributor, the Cohen Film Collection, and has received a rerelease this month at Manhattan’s Film Forum. But though Ms. Dash has spent years approaching Hollywood studios with projects, “Daughters” remains the only feature film she has been able to make.

“I pitched to every existing studio out there and every mini-major from A to Z,” Ms. Dash, 66, said over morning coffee in early September here in Toronto, where the film festival was screening “Daughters,” to celebrate its 25th anniversary.

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Clockwise from top, Barbara-O, Trula Hoosier and Alva Rogers in Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.” Credit Cohen Film Collection

She also couldn’t get an agent, even though “Daughters” drew capacity crowds during its 1992 run at Film Forum, followed by a monthslong engagement at the Village East cinema. “One agency told me I had no future,” Ms. Dash said. “Another company, a mini-major, said it was a fluke.”

Some filmmakers may have seen in her a cautionary tale; the picture was well-received yet indie and experimental. “A lot of people looked at Julie and said, ‘I’m not going that way, look at what happened to Julie,’” said Clyde Taylor, a film scholar and African-American cultural historian.

A prevailing narrative about Ms. Dash is that as an independent, black, female filmmaker, she, along with her work, would probably receive far more attention and support had she emerged today. Among those who hold this view is Ava DuVernay, the director of the feature “Selma” and the documentary “13th,” who describes Ms. Dash as “the queen of it all.” Despite being thwarted in her effort to make more feature films, Ms. Dash has worked steadily, writing a novel and directing television movies, commercials, films for museums and documentaries.

“When I look at the way I’m able to move between indie features and studio features,” Ms. DuVernay said, “and oh, I’ll make the Apple commercial, and oh, I’ll make a piece for the Smithsonian, and oh, I’ll make a documentary — all of the ways that I’m able to shape-shift — Julie has been able to do that. She was just too early. She was ahead of her time.”

Indeed, with its rerelease, “Daughters,” might prove to be ahead of its time, still.

“In many ways, it’s a foreign film,” Mr. Taylor said. “Maybe it’s ahead of its time, and time will have to catch up.”

The foreign film feel of “Daughters” was by design. Raised in the Queensbridge Housing Project in Long Island City, Queens, Ms. Dash earned a degree in film production at City College and went on to be a fellow at the American Film Institute before beginning a master’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, film school in the ’70s. Like other young black filmmakers there, Ms. Dash was impassioned and influenced by avant-garde, Latin American, African and Russian cinema. Together, the loose collective of students pursued new ways of visual storytelling while resisting commercial pressures.

“Not only was there the tremendous trash phenomenon of Blaxploitation movies, that was the background, but black filmmakers were expected to make movies with that kind of junk in it,” Mr. Taylor said.

The work of U.C.L.A. film students such as Charles Burnett (“To Sleep With Anger”), Larry Clark (“Passing Through”), Haile Gerima (“Sankofa”) and Ms. Dash was a rebuke to all that. In 1986, Mr. Taylor curated a retrospective of their work at the Whitney Museum and called the show the “L.A. Rebellion.” The name stuck, and even though “Daughters” was still five years away, it would later be considered part of the movement, too.

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From top, Trula Hoosier, Barbara-O and Alva Rogers in “Daughters of the Dust.” Credit Cohen Film Collection

“I learned I was part of the L.A. Rebellion after the L.A. rebellion rebelled,” Ms. Dash said. “It’s a cute little name, but we were just making films together.”

There was a long road to making “Daughters.” In the ’80s, Ms. Dash wanted to explore lives of black women at the turn of the previous century. She zeroed in on the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia, which, during slavery, were a stopping point for many West African captives after the Middle Passage.

“The Sea Islands are sacred ground; they represent our Ellis Island,” Ms. Dash said in a “making of” short about the film.

She spent years researching the slaves’ descendants, the Gullah, their language, customs, religious beliefs and cuisine, and was able to begin production after PBS’s American Playhouse provided a big chunk of the $800,000 budget. The crew members spent months in preproduction: They made furniture, sweetgrass baskets and gowns using fabrics from the early 1900s, and a linguist taught the actors how to speak the Gullah’s Creole language. In the “making of” short, Ms. Dash said she also decided a “typical male-oriented Western narrative structure” was not appropriate for the film.

“I decided to let the story unravel itself in a way in which an African griot would tell the story, since that’s part of our tradition,” Ms. Dash said in the short. “So the story kind of unfolds throughout this day and a half, in various vignettes. It unfolds, comes back, it unfolds and it comes back.”

Critics hailed the film’s “original, daring, and sincere conception” (The Reader in Chicago) and called it “an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography” (The New York Times), and Ms. Dash found a distributor, Kino International. Though many Americans remained unaware of the film, it gained an international following, and in 2009, a retrospective of her work was held in Taiwan. “I’ve traveled with ‘Daughters’ all over the world,” Ms. Dash said.

Along with reveling in the film’s restoration, rerelease and Beyoncé-borne attention, Ms. Dash was recently inducted, to her delight, into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as part of its effort to diversify its membership. She yearns to do more work, her array of story ideas — a mini-series about African-American women serving overseas in World War II, a movie about a family of traveling black magicians — burning brightly in her mind, further ignited by TV’s broad new reach.

But Ms. Dash is still having trouble getting through the door. The agent she eventually ended up with died years ago, and for all her efforts, she said, she has not been able to get another one since.