Join us for a screening of Cheryl Dunye’s debut feature The Watermelon Woman (1996), a cult classic of the New Queer Cinema movement. The film follows Cheryl, a young Black lesbian filmmaker who’s attempting to make a documentary about Faye Richards, better known as the Watermelon Woman: an elusive Black actor whose uncredited roles in 1930s Old Hollywood films didn’t do justice to the complexities of her life and work. To support her filmmaking endeavours, Cheryl works at a video rental store with her friend Tamara, with and against whom she navigates creative ambition, queer identity, and the racialised and classed dynamics of lesbian dating.

 Straddling fact and fiction, The Watermelon Woman interrogates the marginalisation of queer Black women and women of colour both in the archive and in cinema history. In so doing, it asks vital questions about representational work within and beyond archives, about who gets to do the work of making histories and worlds, and about who is placed in the margins.

Thank you to Lucy Brownson for organising the screening.