Julie Dash

“I may actually first do a ‘New York Stories’ kind of trilogy with Neema. We haven’t decided who would direct the third episode.”

“It will take a look at a woman who has choices to make, and I like that.”

“I felt that it was important to have two narrators: one, the unborn child; two, a very old person, the great-grandmother, Nana. Really dicey, but I wanted two different perspectives: the future and the past.”

“Western drama is based on Greek tragedy, but I didn’t think it really applied to this material.”

“I could have given my grandmother a cassette, and she’d say, ‘Oh, baby, I’m so proud of you,’ but I want her to see the film with an audience and feel its impact.”

“My father had a funny accent.”

“What makes poets good is that they take everyday language and rephrase it so that you never forget it. I wanted to take the African-American experience and rephrase it in such a way that, whether or not you understood the film on the first screening, the visuals would be so haunting it would break through with a freshness about what we already know.”

“I grew up on TV, watching things like ‘Roots’--well, I was hardly a baby when I saw that. You can take only so much input, even about slavery and afterward, and you become callous.”

“I wanted to tell my story in a way that people would never be able to forget it.”

““That was not on my immediate agenda, but I’m so glad that it happened. It saves the film.””

““I never expected [the] Cohen [Film Collection] to come in and be eager to do a restoration of the film and place it in the digital space,””

““I don’t think it’s personal. I think it just had to do with general systemic racism and gender issues.””

““I think I came a bit early,””

““Because we deserved it,””

“I always felt that the stories of others were told with such elegance and grace, and our stories were just kind of brutal. I was determined to reimagine how we are on the screen, in historical drama as well as contemporary life, in a way that showed respect for my family and for the community from which I came.”

“I was very excited by the opportunity to depict African-American women, or women from the African diaspora, in a way that was different from what I was seeing on television at the time or what I saw in blaxploitation films.”