The Watermelon Woman
Cheryl Dunye
»Black people, more specifically black women, even more specifically queer black women have been kept anonymous in the archives, unaccredited and held back from accessing a culture which carries pain but also power.«
– Christabel Samuel, The Watermelon Woman: A Retrospective Look at Black Issues
Young, black and lesbian, Cheryl works in a video store in Philadelphia and earns some extra money making professional wedding videos. While watching old movies from the 1930s and 40s, she comes across a black actress who only appears in the credits under the name »The Watermelon Woman«. Fascinated by this woman, Cheryl begins to research more about this woman’s life, but soon finds an almost complete absence of any information about black actresses of that time. Duly motivated, she sets about filling in this gap in film history, but inaccessible archives, cagey contemporary witnesses, and an affair with an attractive colleague make her life difficult.
A black lesbian woman makes a film about a black lesbian woman who wants to make a film about a black lesbian woman. What at first sounds mind-boggling is in reality a nimble, smart and highly self-reflexive mockumentary about the invisibility of black, queer film history and the essential need to be able to mirror oneself in the writing of history. (MS)
In cooperation with LAG Lesben in NRW
Film Series New Archives
Awards for ›The Watermelon Woman‹
Teddy for the Best Feature Film – Berlinale 1997 | Audience Award for an Outstanding Narrative Feature – L. A. Outfest 1996
Cheryl Dunye
Born in 1966, Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American filmmaker, video artist and performer who first emerged as part of the Queer New Wave in the early 1990s. Often set in an intimate context, her work analyses connections between race, gender and class in the lives of Black lesbians. Humour, the blurring of fiction and reality, the representation of the queer community and the director’s own presence in front the camera are fundamental elements of her cinema.
Films by Cheryl Dunye
Mommy Is Coming 2012 | The Owls 2010 | My Baby’s Daddy 2004 | Stranger Inside 2001 | The Watermelon Woman 1996 | Vanilla Sex 1992 | She don’t fade 1991 | Janine 1990
