Julie Dash’s remarkable 1991 film tells the story of the Peazant family, the descendants of freed slaves who live on the Georgia Sea Islands, an isolated community on the South-Eastern seaboard of the USA, more in touch with African traditions than other black Americans.

The three generations depicted in the film are at a crossroads: the younger Peazants are about to move to the North, leaving the elders behind in the South. Th film's dialogue is in Gullah, a vivid and poetic patois reminiscent of street Jamaican. Dash and her cinematographer, her then husband Arthur Jafa, have achieved a dreamlike visual style of great aesthetic beauty. The pace and editing of the film, which slides gently through different layers of narrative, including the voice-over of an unborn child, creates an elegiac mood, as well as evoking something of the less time-bound perspective of the traditional African mind. In this world, the souls of the ancestors are present, provide guidance and ground for the living.

This was the first widely released American film to have been directed by an African-American woman. Although she is renowned for her activism, Dash is never cliché-bound. The women in the film come across more strongly than the men: from the elder Nana (Cora Lee Day), rich in the wisdom of herbs and potions, and steeped in the spirit-based beliefs of Africa, through the passion and innocence of Eula (Alva Rogers), and on to the world-weariness of Yellow Mary (Barbara O Jones). The entire cast is totally convincing and bring to this almost magical realist tale a feeling of immediacy and veracity.

In the making of her most recent album Lemonade, Beyoncé spoke of being influenced by the film’s emphasis on the importance of African cultural roots – a tradition-focused slant much more sophisticated than the "back to Africa", Afro-hairstyle fashion of the late 1960s. The film addresses, obliquely but no less powerfully, the legacy of slavery and lynching, in the context of an extended family which wrestles, passionately and intelligently, with their spiritual heritage, a legacy of beliefs, ways of relationship and connection with the past, that provide them with great pride – not just in spite of the wounds they have suffered over centuries, but perhaps also in part thanks to them.

This BFI dual-format release of a newly restored print includes Dash's audio commentary to the film, a 72-minute interview with her from earlier this year, as well as one with cinematographer Jafa, and a Q&A with the director from the 2016 Chicago International Film Festival, moderated by playwright and actress Regina Taylor.

Such extras provide invaluable context to an extraordinary work. Dash’s film speaks of traditions that are as fundamentally American as any other, ties that connect African-Americans with their tragic history at the hands of white traders and slave-owners, as well as with their roots further back in a culture in which every form of life, from food and cooking to music and farming, expresses the life of the spirit. It has always partly been this intense spiritual quality in African-American life that has been most threatening to white culture and forms of Christianity intent on seeing the spirit as in some way superior to the senses and the sensual, and denying so vehemently the vitality of the human body and nature. It's true as well, as Beyoncé no doubt recognises, that much of the deep unease which runs through African-American culture today and that leads to violence and drug use, is in part caused by a general loss of connection to the ancestors that Daughters of the Dust so beautifully portrays.

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Overleaf: watch the 2016 trailer for the restored Daughters of the Dust

Broadway so frequently fetes its visiting Brits that it's nice when the honour is repaid.

Make no mistake about it, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright to watch. London receives its first opportunity to appraise his vibrant, quizzical talent with this production of An Octoroon, for which he received an OBIE in 2014 (jointly with his second Off-Broadway work of the same year, Appropriate). His follow-on play Gloria, opening at the Hampstead Theatre in June, was a finalist in the Pulitzer drama category in 2016.

A whacking great story has gone largely untold in British theatre: the legacy of colonialism in India, including the cultural ghosts the British left behind. With the 70^th anniversary of Indian independence just round the corner this summer, poet and playwright Siddhartha Bose has set out to address this "historical amnesia".

The Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro is a chronicle of the pioneering writer and Civil Rights activist James Baldwin. Its director Raoul Peck mirrors the intellectual challenge that Baldwin set his audience: the film demands that you pay close attention and listen to a complex argument backed up visually with diverse social and cultural references.

Two Rode Together (1961) depicts the humanising of Guthrie McCabe (James Stewart), a corrupt, mercenary border town marshal, as it builds to a denunciation of white racism. John Ford, who made the film as a favour to Columbia Pictures (and for a $225,000 salary), considered it “crap”.

There's no reason why ruffs and candles shouldn't mesh with bursts of contemporary speech, song and lighting, given a defter hand than director Ellen McDougall's. Shakespeare's timeless issues of racism and sexism have plenty of mileage in them, though in less skewed proportions than they find here. Many of this production's components are promising, but the whole is a strident mess.

Those of us who saw the first, 1977 TV adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots in our teens still remember the shock and horror at its handling of a subject about which we knew little, American slavery. We know a lot more now, but the visceral reaction to inhumanity and injustice is no less strong. That's thanks to the high production values of the latest version, its gift for finding the right actors, and the often giddying cinematography of an honourable mainstream parallel to a towering masterpiece among movies, 12 Years a Slave.

Sometimes a film can transcend its formulaic confines. That's triumphantly the case with Hidden Figures, a largely prosaically told reworking of the outsider-versus-the-system paradigm that gains piquancy from the story it has to tell and the vibrant personages at its centre. The chronicle of three black female mathematicians who against all sorts of odds transformed America's space movement in the early 1960s for keeps, Theodore Melfi's slice of a forgotten swath of history might have "Oscar upset" written across it – if La La Land at this point didn't look like such a lock. 

That the film has also soared at the box office is heartening news in itself: a reminder that largescale audiences do exist for a portrait of a time when black lives didn't particularly matter, as Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Johnson each discovered in different ways. First encountered on a Virginia road where the three women are tending to a broken-down car only to be approached by a white police officer who brings with him the whiff of fear, Melfi alongside Allison Schroeder's screenplay make implicit the irony of a country devoted to the pursuit of findings in space when so much needs doing here on planet earth. (The movie is based on Margot Lee Shetterly's bestseller of the same title.) 

Not that our fearless and feisty trio are going to let colour barriers and prejudice – not to mention ages-old misogyny – stand in their way. Glimpsed at the start as a six-year-old whiz with numbers whose prowess simply will not be contained, Katherine (Taraji P Henson) is re-encountered as an adult handpicked to join what had been a men's-only flight research team. She immediately faces challenges that range from making coffee from a "colored" pot to sprinting to hell and back in order to find a toilet she can use. Her loo breaks are played for physical comedy shot through inevitably with pathos at the absurd injustice of it all, and the wonderful Henson does both parts of that equation proud, Pharrell Williams's aptly titled "Runnin'" providing a musical cue. While Katherine makes herself increasingly crucial to an initially hostile set of colleagues – the shining exception being her gum-chewing boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner on fine form, pictured above to the left of Henson) – Dorothy (Octavia Spencer, the lone Oscar nominee of the three women) awaits promotion to the rank of supervisor of a room of adroit black mathematicians who must not be left to languish. Her white superior is played by a tight-lipped Kirsten Dunst, who is the equivalent in Dorothy's worklife of the sneering Jim Parsons, one of Harrison's stable and a colleague who all but hisses steam every time Katherine enters his midst. That leaves Mary (the radiant Jonelle Monáe, concurrently also on view in Moonlight), whose own advancement as NASA's first female black engineer depends upon her being able to attend a local, whites-only school. Exuding a whiplash authority with every glance, Monáe projects Mary's intelligence informed at every turn by street smarts.

The women's domestic lives get a look-in now and again, with Moonlight Oscar hopeful Mahershala Ali invaluably on hand as the military man who is there in body and soul for the brainiac that is Katherine. But it's the life of the mind that exists to be celebrated here, as the women ascend in varying ways into career-related orbit, catching the attention of no less a figure than John Glenn (Glen Powell, playing a part amplified in resonance by Glenn's death the same month as the film's American release).

One might wish, I suppose, for filmmaking that itself possessed something of the take-no-prisoners savvy and wit embodied by our triptych of heroines: Melfi's direction takes the expected, conventional route towards uplift, when one wonders what a Barry Jenkins, say, might have made of the same material. On the other hand, I can't imagine not feeling a lump in the throat, not least when the final credits reveal actual images of the women themselves (Johnson is nearing 100), via the same sort of pictorial epilogue on view at Lion and here entirely appropriate to this tribute to three great ladies and how they found it within themselves to roar. 

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Hidden Figures