Daughters of The Dust Review

Daughters of The Dust is about a family of African descent living on an island and maintaining their old customs until most of the them decide to leave the island and move to the mainland up north. I found this movie to be very confusing and it did not seem to have a very strong plot. I think it really tried to use symbolism, but I did not understand most of it and it seemed overused. I had never heard of these people or this area and even though the movie had brief text explaining this at the start, it did not really make anything clearer. I did not follow most of the metaphors used in the film either. I am not sure if this is just because I have no knowledge of this culture or if is because the movie should have included more information. Another thing that confused me about this film is the fact that the characters had a variety of accents even though they were from the same family.

Nothing about the movie was cohesive and I am unsure about what the theme of the film was. There was some drama and plenty of emotion, but done of it really seemed to contribute to an overall theme or plot line. The acting was decent, but seemed wasted in the obscurity of the movie. The film seems so determined to be unconventional, that most of it remained misunderstood by me. I was over halfway through the movie before I was able to have a faint idea about what was going on. I do like the idea of having a not yet born child narrate a story about family heritage, but the story itself needs some work.

Image from http://emeagwali.com/igbo/