Writer-producer-director Julie Dash has taken extraordinary risks. The movie develops and grows and swells into something remarkable and alive, like an idea or a feeling or a child in the womb.

Let's thank Julie Dash for her persistence in bringing us this jewel. This is a story we will tell our children again and again -- and with each retelling, the colors will swell in our souls.

An Atlanta-based artist making her long-worked-for feature debut, Ms. Dash is a filmmaker of startling originality and delicacy. Her film is poetry in motion, part dream-memory, part tattered family album.

Daughters of the Dust is a fascinating combination of novelistic sensibilities and nonlinear poetry.