Bill Duke knew he was going to get flak from a lot of people before he ever turned the cameras on to film Dark Girls, a new documentary about the painful encounters dark-skinned black women experience in a society where lighter is usually considered better.

It's a subject that has, more often than not, been considered taboo to discuss outside the black community. So Duke knew making a general-distribution movie about color prejudice within the black community was definitely going to rub some black folks the wrong way.

"I was in a group like this a few months ago," Duke told a crowd of people who had just screened the movie at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles. "And someone said, 'Why are you airing our dirty laundry?' "