The Watermelon Woman at 30: Cheryl Dunye’s Queer Cinema Landmark

The Watermelon Woman (1996) was Cheryl Dunye’s debut and the first American feature directed by a Black lesbian. A film that slips between video-store romance and a forged archive, asking who gets recorded by cinema and who gets written out of it. Thirty years on, it has been restored, added to the Criterion Collection, and, for the very first time, released in Dutch cinemas.

Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by Justine Knijn, distributor at Eye Filmmuseum and the person bringing the film to the Netherlands. They get into the film’s faked documentary structure and its late reveal; the 1996 sex scene that drew conservative backlash over its tiny public budget; and the satire of academia.

A conversation about lesbian film history, restoration, and the long afterlife of films the industry tried to forget and a case for a mainstream gay summer.

Get tickets to ⁠⁠The Watermelon Woman @ LAB111

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A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.