The Watermelon Woman

The Watermelon Woman was released 30 years ago and was the first feature film directed by an openly lesbian black woman. As director, screenwriter and leading actress, Cheryl Dunye creates a work that is somewhere between romantic comedy, documentary and radical experiment in queer film language.

Alongside her job in the video store, the protagonist Cheryl is a budding filmmaker working on a documentary about Fae Richards, a black actress from the 1930s. On her search, Cheryl receives help from various queer figures from her environment, but also repeatedly encounters institutional hurdles in archives and libraries. Black queer history in particular was often barely documented or actively suppressed there. Her recent relationship with a white woman also makes the tensions of intersectional identities visible.

Dunye shows queer realities of life with a lot of humor and love, including a profound exploration of intersectional identities. The black, queer characters in the film are not only objects of representation, but also the starting point for a rethinking of history, representation and cinematic storytelling. By blurring the boundaries between real and fictional, between documentary and (auto)biographical, Dunye creates new possibilities for telling queer stories. A classic of New Queer Cinema and as relevant today as it was then.

Language change: With English subtitles instead of without.