Beyoncé’s album Lemonade, released in April, includes imagery of African-American women in flowing white dresses that recalls a landmark film made 25 years ago—Daughters of the Dust (1991), written and directed by Julie Dash, is a vivid tone poem focused on a family of Gullah women living on the Sea Islands in South Carolina in the year 1902 and contemplating a move to the American mainland. For those who’ve seen Daughters of the Dust and Lemonade, the parallels are noticeable.

I’m sure the reaction will be positive, especially since Beyoncé’s Lemonade seems to draw inspiration from your film.

We knew it was going to be rough; I certainly knew, because I’d been down there so many times before. I was used to working with a limited budget and that was the largest budget I’d had to date. We were just so happy to be there and able to express ourselves in new, imaginative ways. Working with Arthur Jafa, the cinematographer, and Kerry James Marshall, the production designer, and Michael Kelly Williams, the art director—they’re well-known artists in their own right. Kerry James Marshall, wow—he is one of the masters of fine art today, but we knew it back then, too. To be able to collaborate with this kind of artistic group within a creative environment along the coast . . . we didn’t even think about the bugbites until we got back home, sort of. Because being there at sunrise, at sunset, it was just a remarkable spiritual journey that we were all on.

And that connects to issues that people are still talking about—that just because she’s your wife doesn’t mean you can treat her like she’s property. It’s a marriage; you’re partners. It’s not ownership.

I was not the person who coined the phrase “scraps of memories”—that comes from the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, when he was writing about African-Americans post-Reconstruction, when there were no photographs or records they had of their own. They only had little bits of hair and ribbon, the flotsam and jetsam of their lives that amounted to scraps of memories.

No, not really. I do see things I may have done differently, because I’ve made a number of films since I made this film. But in many ways, it’s just like visiting an old friend. I don’t feel ownership, really, of it—of the story or of the historical events and issues presented in the story. It’s just kinda like, “Oh, I remember that! Yeah.”