Daughters of the Dust-Film review

Daughters of the Dust (1991) Film Review
This movie is a lot different from typical Hollywood films. The English language that the characters use are so hard to understand it almost sounds like a completely different language. The director, Julie Dash, is an African-American female which is not surprising seeing that this film was all about African-American women and their family. There are several main characters in this film. The entire Peazant family is important to the plot. Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Ray) is the Peazant family matriarch who plans to stay at the island where they all grew up, Ibo Landing, when the rest of the family moves to the mainland (migrates North). Yellow Mary (Barbarao), another Peazant woman, comes back to the island to visit the family, with her companion, Trula (Trula Hoosier) who doesn’t seem to speak much but it always by Yellow Mary’s side. Viola Peazant (Cheryl Lynn Bruce), is returning from the mainland who’s trying to get her family to move North and brings along a photographer Mr. Snead (Tommy Redmond Hicks). Eula (Alva Rogers) and Eli Peazant (Adisa Anderson) are a married couple that has a situation where Eula was raped by a white man. They have an Unborn child (Kai-Lynn Warren) who narratives some of the film, that runs around the island as a little girl with a blue ribbon in her hair. Is this child Eli’s daughter, or is it from the white man that raped Eula? That is a question that I wasn’t sure of, even though it was clear that the girl resembling the “Unborn Child” was clearly fully African-American.
Haager Peazant (Kaycee Moore) is married into the family is a stubborn character who doesn’t hold to the family traditions. Her daughter Iona Peazant (Bahni Turpin) is in love with St. Julien Lastchild (M. Cochise Anderson), a youg Cherokee man who loves her in return, and ends up making her stay behind with him on the island.
This film was hard to follow. I was really confused because I didn’t understand the concept of why they were leaving in the first place. It looked like a beautiful island and from a long shot of the sun setting and two women running on the sand. The scenes when the “Unborn Child” was running through the island was in a dream-like slow motion effect that stood out in the film. I liked the concept of the child because it was as though she was in their presence in spirit even though she wasn’t out of her mother’s womb yet. I would not recommend this film to be watched because I didn’t enjoy watching it because it was hard to understand and didn’t have much of a thrill.