Julie Dash was the first african-american woman to receive a general theatrical release in the United States - with her acclaimed Daughters of Dust (1991), a revolutionary film in its dissolution of racial and gender boundaries for American filmmaking.
For the first-time present in Portugal, Dash is one of the filmmakers associated to the L.A. Rebellion movement, also known as Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers: a generation of filmmakers from the 60s to the 80s of UCLA, creators of a revolutionary Black Cinema diverging from Hollywood conventions and attentive to the real african-american lived experiences.
Earlier on her career, Dash completed three short films: Four Women (1975), based on Nina Simone’s song with the same name and representative of four main african-american stereotypes of women surviving within the USA; The Diary of an African Nun (1977), inspired by an Alice Walker’s short story of an Ugandan nun’s growing doubts in her commitment to poverty, chastity and divine obedience, which won a student award from the Directors Guild of America; and Illusions (1982), about the integration of a young African-american woman in the toxic Hollywood environment, in exchange for her right to her real black identity.
Illusions was named to the National Film Registry in 2020 by the US Library of Congress, joining her most well-known feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991) which has been preserved in this archive since 2004. This seminal work by Dash portrays the migration of a gullah family from Saint-Helena’s island to the north of the USA, and the painful let-go of their ethnic and communitarian family traditions. Her impressive independent production has won multiple awards, including the Cinematography Prize at the Sundance Film Festival (1991), and the Special Prize at the New York Film Critics Circle (2016), and officially featured in a number of cinema festivals - such as the Toronto International Film Festival (1991), the Fribourg International Film Festival (2019), the Locarno International Film Festival (2019), the Dublin International Film Festival (2021) and the Sidney Film Festival (2022).
Additionally, the director has produced video clips for musicians like Peabo Bryson, Adriana Evans and Tracy Chapman and expanded her television work through productions such as Funny Valentines (1999) and Rosa Parks Story (2002) - where Dash tells the story of this iconic figure for the civil rights movement, known for her refusal to obey the prejudiced american laws for racial segregation prevalent in the 50s. Retaining her socio-political involvement, Dash has recently been on the producing team of Women of the Movement (2022), an anthology of the same social movement for equal civil rights named after and particularly focused on their female protagonists, and still teaches at the acclaimed Universities of Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and Yale.