Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
An Evening with Julie Dash
FILM PROGRAM ACCOMPANYING THE EXHIBITION THE FEMININE QUESTION 1550–2025
“Let them touch you with the hand of time”
An evening with Julie Dash
An evening with Julie Dash
Julie Dash’s films have always insisted that Black women’s interior lives, be it ancestral, spiritual, erotic or just plain everyday, are not marginal subjects. Long before Daughters of the Dust entered the canon, her early shorts established the cinematic grammar she would go on to refine across decades.
In Four Women (1975), her first short film, inspired by Nina Simone’s song of the same title, Dash creates a choreographic portrait of Black womanhood with dancer Linda Martina Young, whose body becomes a vessel for inherited stories of pain, defiance, survival, and sensuality. The film is a kinetic study of embodiment structured around Simone’s four archetypes of Black femininity, her vocals mirrored in light and movement, refusing in unison the flattening of representation that those very archetypes imply.
Two years later, in Diary of an African Nun (1977), Dash adapts Alice Walker’s short story about a cloistered African nun whose vow of chastity and obedience becomes a violent spiritual contradiction. Where Four Women expands the body into expressive multiplicity, Diary confines it, exposing the colonial and theological pressures that turn inner freedom into inner exile. Already here, Dash is shaping a cinema that attends to the textures of spiritual struggle, the violence of Western cultural supremacy, and the cost of narratives that demand self-erasure.
These two early works serve as an introduction to the aesthetic and philosophical commitments that ground Daughters of the Dust (1991) – the first feature film directed by a Black woman to receive wide theatrical distribution in the United States. The film is set on the Sea Islands in Georgia, home to the Gullah/Geechee people whose language, rituals, and cosmologies retain distinct continuities with West and Central African traditions. A nonlinear narrative is anchored by the intertwined voices of the Unborn Child and the family matriarch Nana Peazant, who together tell a story of migration, memory, and the ruptures that define diasporic life.
Daughters of the Dust was groundbreaking at the time of its release through Dash’s refusal of Hollywood narrative conventions, the elevation of Black women as cosmological interpreters, and the deep embedding of African-derived spiritual practices into cinematic language. This is what Kameelah L. Martin identifies as Black feminist voodoo aesthetics – a visual and narrative lineage in which Black women’s conjure traditions, healing practices, and ancestral knowledge become the organizing principles of world-building rather than its periphery.
In this context, it is impossible not to note the structural barriers Dash faced. As one of the central figures of the LA Rebellion, she worked within a community explicitly rejecting Hollywood’s racial and aesthetic hierarchies. But even as the movement forged a radically alternative film language, the industry remained hostile to Black independent cinema, and especially to the visions of Black women.
Hollywood’s long-standing exclusion meant that Dash developed her practice in an environment where experimental Black filmmaking was treated as commercially impossible. Dash herself was repeatedly told by industry members that choosing formal innovation meant choosing permanent marginality. Her achievement, then, is not merely artistic but also structural: she helped carve out a space where a film like Daughters of the Dust could exist at all, slowly building an audience for work that demanded new ways of looking, new ways of listening, and new relations between image, story, and spectatorship.
Hollywood’s long-standing exclusion meant that Dash developed her practice in an environment where experimental Black filmmaking was treated as commercially impossible. Dash herself was repeatedly told by industry members that choosing formal innovation meant choosing permanent marginality. Her achievement, then, is not merely artistic but also structural: she helped carve out a space where a film like Daughters of the Dust could exist at all, slowly building an audience for work that demanded new ways of looking, new ways of listening, and new relations between image, story, and spectatorship.
Across these three films, Dash’s work resonates with what scholars of conjure feminism describe as a Black women’s intellectual tradition grounded in ritual knowledge, ancestral presence, and the everyday practices of survival.
Conjure feminism treats spirituality as a way of reading the world that honours matrilineal memory, blurs the line between the sacred and the ordinary, and understands liberation as something worked through the body, the land, and the unseen. In Dash’s hands, cinema becomes one more ritual space in which those notions are expressed: where women speak to their ancestors, to each other, and to the generations still on their way. Her films ask their audiences questions not only about what they see, but also about what they can learn to see.
Conjure feminism treats spirituality as a way of reading the world that honours matrilineal memory, blurs the line between the sacred and the ordinary, and understands liberation as something worked through the body, the land, and the unseen. In Dash’s hands, cinema becomes one more ritual space in which those notions are expressed: where women speak to their ancestors, to each other, and to the generations still on their way. Her films ask their audiences questions not only about what they see, but also about what they can learn to see.
[Aleksandra Jeglińska]
