Truth in Fiction
DIRECTOR CHERYL DUNYE TALKS TO DIVA FILM EDITOR LUCY PETERS ABOUT BRINGING QUEER WOMEN OF COLOUR TO THE BIG SCREEN
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.