The Watermelon Woman poster

The Watermelon Woman

1997 · Cheryl Dunye

For when you want something witty and romantic that also gives you plenty to chew on — a comfort watch with a sharp mind, great for a night when you're in the mood for indie charm over polish.

What it's about

Cheryl, a young Black lesbian working at a Philadelphia video store, becomes obsessed with a 1930s Black actress credited in old films only as 'The Watermelon Woman,' and sets out to document her life. As her research deepens, she's also fumbling through a new romance with a white customer — and both threads keep asking who gets remembered and who does the remembering.

The experience

Funny, flirty, and scrappy in the best way — it plays like a video diary made by your smartest friend, then sneaks up on you with real melancholy about everything history threw away. Its lo-fi charm is the point; it feels alive and handmade.

Performances

Cheryl Dunye, directing herself as 'Cheryl,' has a warm, deadpan screen presence that makes the whole experiment feel effortless, and Guinevere Turner brings prickly chemistry as the love interest.

The craft

Dunye invented a form she called the 'Dunyementary,' braiding fiction, mock-documentary, and video diary — and the 'archival' photographs of her subject were fabricated so convincingly with artist Zoë Leonard that they were later exhibited as art in their own right. The sleight of hand is the argument: when history erases you, you have to build your own archive.

Why it matters

The first feature by an out Black lesbian director in American cinema, made for around $300,000 at the tail end of New Queer Cinema — a foundational text for anyone thinking about who film history leaves out.

The first feature by an out Black lesbian director in American cinema, made for around $300,000 at the tail end of the New Queer Cinema wave — and one of the wittiest films about the archive ever made. Cheryl Dunye plays 'Cheryl,' a Philadelphia video-store clerk and aspiring filmmaker researching a 1930s Black actress credited only as 'The Watermelon Woman,' while fumbling through a romance with a white customer (Guinevere Turner). The form Dunye invented — she called it the 'Dunyementary' — braids fiction, mock-documentary and video diary, and the archival photographs of her subject were fabricated with artist Zoë Leonard, a project so convincing it later exhibited as art in its own right. The sleight of hand carries the film's argument: Black queer women were written out of film history so thoroughly that recovering them requires invention. Its NEA grant drew fire from a scandalized congressman; a quarter-century later, the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. The final title card states the method plainly: sometimes you have to create your own history.

A Deleuzian reading

A 1930s picture is playing on a video-store TV, and one of the actresses in it is better than the film deserves.

The full Deleuzian reading of The Watermelon Woman →

Reception

A scrappy micro-budget indie that premiered at the 1996 Berlinale (winning the Teddy Award) and was best known in the US for a manufactured NEA funding scandal, it's since been restored, added to the National Film Registry in 2021, and canonized as a landmark of New Queer Cinema.

How The Watermelon Woman was received, from release to now →

Influences: the films it descends from and the films it influenced

  • David Holzman's Diary (1967) — Established the fictional first-person diary film in which the director plays a filmmaker turning the camera on his own life, the exact fake-autobiography conceit Dunye adopts by casting herself as 'Cheryl' shooting her own investigation.
  • Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) — A Black director's self-reflexive meta-documentary that films its own making and folds the crew into the story, prefiguring Dunye's film-within-a-film structure of a Black filmmaker documenting her own production.
  • Portrait of Jason (1967) — Puts a Black queer subject alone before the camera performing and narrating the self, the direct-address confessional mode Dunye repurposes for her video-diary pieces to camera.
  • Zelig (1983) — Pioneered the seamless fabrication of faux-vintage photographs and newsreels to invent a historical figure, the same forged-archive technique Dunye and Zoe Leonard use to manufacture Fae Richards' photographic record.
  • F for Fake (1973) — An essay-film that dramatizes the authorship and authenticity of archives and openly admits its own hoaxing, modeling Dunye's play with the truth-status of the documentary record she assembles.
  • Tongues Untied (1989) — Fused video-diary confession, direct address, and documentary into a Black queer first-person form on cheap video, the hybrid low-fi aesthetic and autobiographical voice Dunye builds her feature around.
  • Illusions (1982) — Dramatizes the erasure of Black women from Hollywood's history and the labor hidden behind its images, the archive-recovery project Dunye literalizes by inventing a forgotten Black actress.
  • Daughters of the Dust (1991) — Established a Black-woman-authored independent cinema of memory and ancestral image-making, the tradition of self-made history Dunye extends into a fabricated lesbian genealogy.
  • Sherman's March (1986) — Perfected the wandering first-person documentary where the filmmaker's own romantic life derails the ostensible subject, the autobiographical digression structure Dunye weaves through her research plot.
  • Paris Is Burning (1990) — Documentary portraiture of a Black and Latinx queer subculture built from talking-head testimony, the interview-driven ethnographic texture Dunye both borrows and interrogates through fictional 'experts.'
  • She's Gotta Have It (1986) — Uses direct-address and mock-testimonial structure to interrogate Black female desire, inheriting Lee's reflexive first-person Black indie voice.
  • Looking for Langston (1989) — Fabricates a pseudo-archive to recover an erased Black queer figure, extending Julien's tactic of imaginatively reconstructing histories the record refused to keep.
  • CSA: The Confederate States of America (2004) — A feature-length mockumentary that fabricates a complete fake broadcast archive to critique the racial writing of American history, directly extending Dunye's forged-archive-as-argument method.
  • Pariah (2011) — Carries Dunye's Black-lesbian first-person authorship into a new generation of independent film, centering a young Black queer woman's self-definition that Watermelon Woman made visible.
  • Framing Agnes (2022) — Recovers a lost queer/trans archive through staged reenactment that openly blurs document and performance, inheriting Dunye's strategy of dramatizing the gaps in the historical record rather than merely filling them.
  • Poison (1991) — A founding New Queer Cinema film that splices genre pastiche and documentary registers into a fragmented low-budget form, sharing Dunye's movement-defining collage approach to queer storytelling.
  • Swoon (1992) — A New Queer Cinema work that reconstructs a suppressed queer past through stylized period archive and reclaimed historical figures, the same recovery-of-erased-queer-history impulse driving Watermelon Woman.
  • The Living End (1992) — Exemplifies New Queer Cinema's guerrilla economics—shot cheap, personal, and defiantly queer—the DIY production ethic Dunye shares as she makes a feature on grant money and friends.
  • Compensation (1999) — Black independent feature that mobilizes (and fabricates) archival photographs to construct a usable Black history — the same evidentiary use of still images Davis threads between her timelines.
  • Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) — Shares the fabricated-archive strategy, manufacturing fake documentary/found footage to interrogate how mass culture constructs (and erases) a woman's image.

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