Watermelon Woman, The (1996) (Previously Unreleased)

Why were black lesbian actors erased from the history of early cinema? A meta-reflection on that absence might sound dryly academic, but seasoned director Cheryl Dunye proves the opposite in her witty, archive-rich mockumentary. It turns out that fiction reveals the truth.

Dunye plays herself as ‘Cheryl’, a video shop assistant with aspirations to direct. Cheryl’s focus is on film history and the way it was written. Why, for example, were the names of black actresses never mentioned in the early years of cinema? And why do they appear to be virtually absent from the film archives? Cheryl, herself a young black lesbian woman, sets out to investigate. In her fictional documentary, Dunye weaves her personal history with invented facts and events. As a researcher, she creates the character Fae Richards, who appears in the credits of the equally fictional film Plantation Memories as ‘The Watermelon Woman’. Richards does, however, turn out to be found in the archives – constructed by Dunye; she had a relationship with the film’s white director, a situation mirrored in Dunye’s own life when she begins dating the white film scholar Diana.

THE WATERMELON WOMAN is a sharp blend of film lecture and romantic comedy rolled into one. Dunye offers a incisive critique of the erasure of Black film history in Hollywood, whilst also painting a witty portrait of the academic world known as ‘queer media studies’. Dunye’s first feature film – also the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian woman – premiered at the Berlinale in 1996 and won the Teddy Award for Best LGBTQIA+ Feature Film. The film had not previously been shown in cinemas in the Netherlands.