What is the movie watermelon woman about?

An aspiring black lesbian filmmaker (Cheryl Dunye) researches an obscure 1940s black actress billed as the Watermelon Woman.The Watermelon Woman / Film synopsis

Why is the Watermelon Woman important?

The Watermelon Woman is a landmark of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, a time of queer formal experimentation with cinematic language. These mostly low-budget indie features were characterised by excess, irreverence and the revolutionary cynicism of the AIDS period.

Is The Watermelon Woman on Netflix?

Rent The Watermelon Woman (1996) on DVD and Blu-ray – DVD Netflix.

Is The Watermelon Woman a true story?

“The Watermelon Woman is fiction.” As a Black queer woman, Dunye has limited access to her ancestry—so she must create relationships to it through her imagination.

Was Fae Richards a real person?

The substance of the narrative, including a film career sabotaged by racism, rings true; but Fae Richards never existed. Her life was staged for the contemporary camera.

What was the watermelon woman’s name?

Through interviews, archival work, and lots of time watching early black cinema, she eventually discovers that the Watermelon Woman was named Faith Richardson—Faye Richards to Hollywood—and that she’d begun her career as a performer in Philadelphia’s gay clubs, singing dressed in a top hat and white tuxedo.

How does the Watermelon Woman end?

At the end of the movie we find out that The Watermelon Women was never a real person. The Watermelon Women was made out of Cheryl’s imagination so that validates that Cheryl was trying to make a point that African American LGBT were not present in the film industry.

What year was Watermelon Woman set?

It stars Dunye as Cheryl, a young black lesbian working a day job in a video store while trying to make a film about a black actress from the 1930s known for playing the stereotypical “mammy” roles relegated to black actresses during the period. March 5, 1997 (U.S.)