Adding a dash of authenticity

Julie Dash wanted to make films just to tell stories of Afro-Americans, to visualise them in a way no one has done. The filmmaker from the United States found that the films usually made about her community were inaccurate and fictitious. “The directors did not know the tiny details of our culture,” she said.

On the last day of the 15th International Film Festival of Kerala, she shared her thoughts and experiences on independent filmmaking in the US, specifically in the seventies.

Graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), she set out to find a different aesthetic for film making. The film movements at the time, her stint at UCLA and her contemporaries Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima hugely motivated her. “We worked in various capacities, were trained as filmmakers in the classic sense,” she said, describing the collaborative work environment in her films. “In the seventies, being a filmmaker meant being a complete nerd. I am quite happy that the profession has become glamorous.”

Discussing her films

Daughters of the Dust and The Rosa Parks Story , screened at the IFFK under the Spirit of Independence package, she said she would rather focus on women and family issues than action films. The role of women directors in the US was limited and the African Americans still needed to be represented authentically.

‘Bank on the Net'

Her advice for aspiring filmmakers is to “work from heart to pursue excellence and not bother about revenue.” “If you want your film to reach the audience, you have the Internet,” she said, implying that distribution was not a huge problem anymore.