In 1996, Cheryl Dunye released The Watermelon Woman — the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian. Shot on 16mm for a reported $300,000, it feels less like a polished period piece and more like a living artifact, a DIY mixtape of fiction and documentary. The film centers on Cheryl (played by Dunye herself), a young video store clerk and aspiring filmmaker in Philadelphia, who becomes obsessed with a shadowy figure from 1930s Hollywood: a Black actress credited only as “The Watermelon Woman” in films like Plantation Memories . Cheryl names her Fae Richards.
Dunye’s genius is to . Cheryl never finds a lost masterpiece by Fae. She never finds a letter where Fae declares her politics. What she finds is a phonograph record, a few stills, a passing mention in a gossip column, and the memory of Lee. Fae’s story remains incomplete — but that incompleteness is the point. The film argues that fragments are a form of wholeness when the whole was never allowed to exist. fylm The Watermelon Woman 1996 mtrjm kaml
This is the film’s political core: For marginalized people, especially queer Black women, the official archive is a tool of erasure. Therefore, you must become an archivist of your own life. You must film your friends, record your mother’s stories, reenact what was never filmed. The matrix is not given; it is built. In 1996, Cheryl Dunye released The Watermelon Woman