Cheryl Dunye's groundbreaking queer romcom has been newly restored and remastered in HD.

20 Years On, “The Watermelon Woman” Is As Fresh As Ever

As Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight continues to rack up praise, a trailblazing piece of gay black cinema celebrates a milestone: 1996’s The Watermelon Woman rings in its 20th Anniversary with a slick new restoration and rerelease.

Watermelon Woman

Writer-director Cheryl Dunye’s provocative and sexy comedy starred the filmmaker as her semi-autobiographic alter-ego, “Cheryl,” a Philly video-store clerk who decides to make a documentary about an obscure black actress from the 1930s.

The Watermelon Woman

While researching Fae Richards, a.k.a. “The Watermelon Woman,” she excavates a hidden lesbian history and confronts her own identity as a queer black woman, while juggling a romance with a white woman named Diana (Guinevere Turner) and a friendship with sassy BFF Tamara (Valerie Walker).

The first feature film directed by an African-American lesbian, Watermelon Woman won the Berlin Film Festival’s Teddy Award and famously incensed Jesse Helms when it received a $31,500 government grant from the NEA. (Helms dismissed the film as “flotsam floating down the sewer.”)

Painstakingly restored and remastered in HD, The Watermelon Woman has earned generations of new fans at special screenings earlier this year.

Amanda Edwards/WireImage

“I had an audience member ask, ’How were you able to predict or touch on Black Lives Matters?'” shares Dunye, who went on to direct HBO’s Stranger Inside, 2004’s My Baby’s Daddy, and 2010’s The Owls.

“Its so funny, because these issues haven’t changed. When Cheryl, the character, gets arrested and the cops think she’s a boy, that still happens today. It’s still fresh and current, so many of the negative things have not changed.”

Moonlight

She’s doing her part to change that with a new film going into production this spring: Set in a futuristic Oakland, it’s a love story between a transgender woman and trans man, featuring cinema’s first AI of color.

“I have not seen a colored robot before,” Dunye muses. “I’m dipping into the Afro-futurist mode and might have a little film noir.”









The remastered edition of The Watermelon Woman comes to DVD on January 17.