Twenty years after it was made, Cheryl Dunye’s first feature film, The Watermelon Woman, still feels astonishingly radical. Following a young black lesbian as she tries to trace the life story of a mysterious 1930s actress, it asks haunting questions about what history means to queer women of colour.
Dunye followed it up with Stranger Inside, a drama about family bonds and lesbian relationships inside a women’s prison, The Owls, about a group of “older, wiser lesbians” who become entangled in a murder, and Mommy Is Coming, a sex comedy set in the Berlin underworld.
Originally touted as part of film’s “queer new wave” in the 1990s, the writer-director seems to have remained continually ahead of the curve, while Hollywood representations of women, queer people and people of colour lag oceans behind.