REVIEW: Daughters of the Dust [1991]

I ain’t got no more dreams, cousin. The voice we hear is of the unborn child (Kai-Lynn Warren) growing inside Eula Peazant (Alva Rogers). She speaks about the events onscreen from a future that ensures her birth if not her residence—the lynchpin to the entirety of Julie Dash‘s Daughters of the Dust who metaphorically and literally serves as a bridge between old and new. A mainland white man raped Eula and thus the possibility our narrator is his child rather than Eula’s husband Eli’s (Adisa Anderson) eats away at the…

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REVIEW: Bless Their Little Hearts [1984]

“I’m tired, tired, tired. Start trying to be a man.” There’s no getting around the connection that binds Billy Woodberry‘s Bless Their Little Hearts to Charles Burnett‘s Killer of Sheep. Both were written by Burnett, shot in Watts, and entries in the movement known as the “LA Rebellion”. They both deal with the struggle to survive as a family on the poverty line with little wiggle room as far as an escape. But even as they share cast/crew members barely five years apart, the two are also as different from…

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REVIEW: Killer of Sheep [1978]

“Now that ain’t me … and damn sure won’t be” It’s not everyday that a masters thesis film is declared a national treasure by the Library of Congress and placed on the National Film Registry, but films like Charles Burnett‘s Killer of Sheep don’t come along everyday either. Shot on weekends over a year in the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles, Burnett’s debut feature was made for less than ten thousand dollars, never received a theatrical run until three decades after its 1977 completion date, and remained largely unseen due…

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