The Watermelon Woman
Here’s the quintessential video store movie and a fun and feisty queer romantic comedy from groundbreaking filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. A young black lesbian filmmaker — in between stocking video store shelves and flirting with cute customers — probes into the life of the Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played a number of ‘mammy’ archetypes in early cinema. She begins to see a number of parallels to her own life and her new relationship with a white woman. Dunye manages to create a film that explores potentially divisive ideas of race, gender, and queerness, but never feels didactic or anything less than thoroughly irreverent and entertaining.
And thanks to our friends at Criterion, we will have limited giveaways before the show!