“At Hackensack High School in New Jersey, where her family later moved, [Melina] Matsoukas was into photography and hip-hop. At home, she watched the films of Mira Nair, The Color Purple, All About My Mother, The Royal Tenenbaums, West Side Story, Belly, and her absolute favorite, Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dust, an impressionistic movie about three generations of Gullah women on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island. It was also the first feature directed by a black woman to be released widely in theaters. ‘The queen of Black women filmmakers [is] Dash,’ Matsoukas told the website Shadow and Act in August. ‘She was a tremendous influence … on my voice.’”

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