Daughters of the Dust 
Julie Dash

In my opinion, this film captures the unspeakably beautiful poetry of the black experience in America more successfully than any other film ever made. Period. When it came out in the early 1990s, most critics couldn’t get past its breathtakingly epic cinematography, which was meticulously choreographed by director of photography Arthur Jafa. Dash and Jafa broke new ground with this film, experimenting heavily with formal elements, such as frame rate, to express the unique way a black culture forged from forced migrations and slavery looks and moves. But Daughters is also a story of African Americans becoming just that, leaving a broken and painful past and embracing emerging identities as the twentieth century began. A second look now might reveal some insights about the transformations we are undergoing again as we shake off our civil rights era selves and try out a new, let’s hope, more international black self.