The Watermelon Woman

One of the first feature films made by an African American lesbian, this ‘mockumentary’ ostensibly investigates the life of a forgotten black actress from the thirties known only as, the Watermelon Woman. Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye plays herself as a video shop employee and budding film director who begins researching the actress with a view to making a movie based upon her life story. As she uncovers archival footage and conducts interviews with archivists, scholars (played in a series of cameos by real-life experts including Camille Paglia) and women who lived in the Philadelphia area in the thirties, Dunye pieces together a previously unacknowledged history of African American lesbian life in the thirties. She finds that the Watermelon Woman was a nightclub singer named Fae Richards who was the lover of the white Hollywood female director, Martha Page. Meanwhile, Dunye herself falls in love with Diana (Guinevere Turner), one of the customers that frequent the video store where she works. Their passionate relationship allows her to explore her own feelings around interracial romance. The film functions on two levels, as a wry, irreverent look at contemporary black lesbian culture, and as a critique of official narratives that have erased this culture from history. While Dunye ultimately reveals the Watermelon Woman as a fiction, she points out that “sometimes you have to create you own history”.