Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
As viewers we are arrested - visually, emotionally, spatially and temporally. We are submerged in the earthiness of oak groves, salt marshes, the ocean and trees. An earthiness against the whiteness of the dresses, flowy, dreamlike, airy as wind passes through the silk material - an echo of the motion of dreams. Daughters of the Dust unfolds within an historic former slave port, a terrain steeped in the dark history of colonialism, a home immersed in horror though it is a haven for both self-emancipated Africans and indigenous people. The film is a sequence defying conventions, one that centralises the voice, experience and culture of women, grappling with ideas of identity, memory and cultural retention as the central family decides whether to migrate, remain, or return.
This sprawling sequence of poetry and trauma is narrated by the dual voices of Nana and the unborn child, destabilising conventional realist senses of time in a stacking of the past, present and future. Here, Nana embodies the past with her visions and connections to history and ancestors… She is the film’s emotional and historical core. The child embodies liminality - both there and not there, embodying a collapse of boundaries. Ideas of cultural dispossession unravel through both voices; Nana illuminates these in her struggles to keep intact their home in the tortured land. It is a land under relentless attack; though relocation away from this ancestral place risks cultural dispossession, in staying there the family are imperilled by rape and lynch mob murder. In this way the drama is one hinging on rituals of loss and recovery, enhanced by its structure which consistently disrupts dominant realist conventions of Eurocentric linear storytelling. The narrative is circular as opposed to linear- a storytelling structural feature that is fundamental to West African narrative tradition.
Ideas of multiplicity and plural identities simmer beneath the surface of this beautifully strung sequence- ideas that don't attempt to simplify or reduce. The film is one that resists overdetermined images of black femininity forcing a singular identity - here, characters and identities aren't diminished. The experiences of the family are inflected by ineffable tensions, pains, joys and desires; it is this vital idea that identity is not an essence but a process in constant flux. These men and women are self-defining people, not static portraits. But within this image of identity utterly unconstrained, free and liberated, is the horrifying fact of colonialism - how it cripples and deforms on an ontological level, distorting identity to the extent that the very ‘loss of identity’ becomes integral to the experience of those subjected to the horrors of colonialism. Identity, though still unconstrained in many ways, becomes characterised by liminality, strewn with gulfs and rifts of separation. If not resisted, the insidious disease of colonialism produces individuals “without anchor or horizon, colourless, starless, rootless” (as articulated by Fanon).
Daughters of the Dust is a film that strains and protests against the shackles of imperialism- it is itself an act of radical protest. Unreconciled exclusions and tensions permeate the narrative, for it is a film which doesn't preoccupy itself with its own understandability. The dialogue isn't necessarily intelligible, the story-line not one of crystalline clarity. It doesn’t subjugate itself to the tyranny of intelligibility to a mainstream audience, it is able to maintain a radical privacy, resisting the idea of the audience’s right to enact unproblematic entry into characters and contexts. And why should they be able to? As viewers, impossibly distanced from the conflicts and struggles strewn before us, what right do we have to be master of that universe? It is a film that interrogates this mindless spectator, this onlooker conditioned by a viewing industry that masks history and addicts us to voyeurism and mystified notions of our world of beauty and trauma.
Cinema is a powerful vehicle for the perpetuation and reification of dominant ideologies - Daughters of the Dust is a self-conscious sequence compellingly aware of this terrifying and incredible fact. It is more than a resisting piece of filmwork, it is itself a creation, a force that wields the ability to collapse boundaries, to elevate voice in a place conditioned into silence.