It’s now widely known Beyoncé’s Lemonade drew very heavily on the visuals of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and was instrumental in helping to bring the 1991 film back into the forefront of culture. But the original, which has been remastered in luscious 4K and re-released on Blu-Ray this month, fares remarkably well when compared to its visual album disciple.

Viewed through the lens of 2017, one is struck by how it so magically balances obsolescence with Afrofuturism. This time in which we are living feels dire to many. For African Americans, present circumstances have led to a rise in utopian thinking; a collective search for a place in which we will not be murdered, hounded, over-policed and constantly re-traumatized with the legacy of slavery, lynchings and virulent white supremacy. After all these many years we are still, in effect, searching for a place to be free. Predictably we seek this place in the past as well as the future, for what they both have in common is that they are away from here. The reason Afrofuturism looks so very much like the Afro-past depicted in Lemonade and its progenitor Daughters Of The Dust is because both the past and the future involve the spirit beyond the material world.

Caught between the future and the past, between casket and womb, Daughters Of the Dust is a meditation not just on black life, but on life itself, the passage of time, and the search for home. It is not a story so much as a family photograph – studied, and patient, pure and unadorned. Through images of arresting beauty – sand dunes so granular they become ethereal, white dresses against black skin swaying in a crepuscular apricot evening sky – Dash, cinematographer Arthur Jafa, and production designer Kerry Marshall lay out a visual theory of diasporic beauty that is, in and of itself, a utopian escape from the thuggish, broken, scarred and suffering images we typically see of blackness.

The story mostly takes place in 1902 and loosely weaves several strands that converge at a pivotal moment for the Peazant clan, a Gullah family (slave descendants whose isolation from the mainland allows them to retain vast portions of African culture). When we arrive, the family is preparing to migrate to the mainland. But it is unknown who all will join this symbolic and literal crossing. The lingering question provides much of the film’s uncertainty. A feast has been set which calls all the children home. Yellow Mary, a wayward prostitute tainted by big city life, and Viola, a Christian missionary who brings a photographer to capture her people’s beauty, arrive from the mainland. Eli and Eula are a young couple expecting a child, but we learn that the baby may well be the product of a rape Eula endured on the mainland.

This is the setup. But the telling is unhurried and in many cases unfinished. We are simply here among these people as they face life and what we mostly see are tableaux, verdant photographs of African beauty so profound and deeply rooted as to be nearly cosmic. The intermittent return to family portraits offers one framing device, but another is the voice of the as-of-yet unborn child offering observations from both the past and the future. In this film womb and ancestor are one, and as Eli wrestles with the fear that Eula’s child may not be his, and the subsequent inability to distinguish a symbol of love from a symbol of hate, family matriarch Nana reminds him that the question is not his to answer. The child has a voice of her own.

This debate on the nature of the past and the future, destiny and fate, is the film’s chief conflict. Should we stay or should we go? To be black in America is to be forever caught between the sins and promises of this nation. The Peazants can only guess whether it is safer to remain in the home slavery has given them or risk ending up somewhere worse.

If you are reading this then you are, in all likelihood, the branch of the human family that fared forth. Our present is the future that awaits them. We can go back and tell them that it does not go well. That maybe they should just stay among the dunes and vast coral sea, the okra and shrimp. And perhaps the film exists to make this dialogue possible. As Nana tells us at beginning, it’s up to the living to keep in touch with the dead. What she does not tell us, however, which branch of the family is which.

•Daughters of the Dust is out now on Blu-ray in the US, and in the UK in cinemas on 2 Jun and Blu-ray and DVD on 26 Jun.