Continuing on with new additions to the 2022 S&S poll, #60 sees Moonlight (which I’ve previously seen, and is excellent — the rare hyper-recent movie that I think is uncontroversial this high up) and Daughters of the Dust.

So this is directed by Julie Dash, and is the first movie by a Black woman on this list. Dash directed the movie in 1991 on a shoestring budget; it received generally favorable reviews and got a wide release, but didn’t really break out of the indie-movie landscape. Crash cut to 2016, when Beyoncé’s Lemonade heavily draws on its images and visual style, and the movie gets a theatrical 25th anniversary re-release with glowing reviews, and now here it is on this list.

It’s great that it’s getting re-appraised and finding its audience, but the tragedy is that these kinds of re-appraisals can’t rewind time: In a better world, this would be the first feature film from a director with a long and illustrious filmography. In reality, she couldn’t get funding to make more movies after this, and spent her career in television.

But setting all that context aside for the moment, let’s talk about the movie itself. It’s a movie about an extended multi-generational Gullah family on the eve of a great migration — it’s 1902, and they want to move from St. Simons Island to Nova Scotia. Well, mostly: The elderly matriarch of the family doesn’t want to move, and a few others are conflicted.

But this isn’t really a story about any particular conflict that gets ironed out, it’s a non-linear portrayal of this family, cutting between the present and the past, and showing them here at this cusp of a big transition — there’s a set of parents-to-be who are going through a conflict (their unborn child narrates much of the film), there are family members returned from the mainland (one a prostitute, scorned by the rest of the family; another a ramrod-straight Christian woman), and throughout there’s a tension between the past and the future, the old religion and the new Christianity, their long-time island home and their anticipated new Canadian home.

The movie is visually gorgeous — it’s easy to see why Beyoncé would have been inspired by its imagery — and the characters are compelling. Apparently at the time, it was seen as aggressively indie/experimental, with its non-linearity, queer characters, and lack of a clear central storyline, and was a bridge too far for some audiences.

But watching it today, I feel like its failures fall on the other side: It’s trying too hard to be conventional. The most egregious thing here is the score; it was praised at the time as “lush,” which it is, but it gives everything a kind of weirdly-offputting “eighties costume drama” vibe, in a way that weakened some of the visuals. Like, an old woman staring grimly into the wind can work as a shot, but with this music over it, it just feels like a hoary cliche. This seems to be an idiosyncratic reaction on my part, but I really feel like I would have liked this movie much better if it had a sparer and less “romantic” score.

Still, “the music felt kinda dated and too Hollywood” isn’t a devastating criticism, and shouldn’t be. This is a good movie taken on its own terms; and as a snapshot of both what was missed and what was irretrievably lost, it becomes essential.