Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman

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Cheryl Dunye is an openly lesbian film director, producer and actress concerned with issues facing black lesbians. She was born in Monrovia, Liberia in 1966 and later moved on to Philadelphia, where she received her BA from Temple University and her MFA from Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts.
She emerged as part of the 1990's "queer new wave" of young film and video makers who dealt with gay and lesbian themes with a new directness and vitality.
In 1992 Dunye was a recipient of the Art Matters, Inc. Fellowship and in 1993, her work was included in that year’s Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. In her life she has also written articles for the journals Time Out, Felix and Movement Research, and …show more content…

Outfest. It tells the story of Cheryl as African-American lesbian who works in a video rental store in Philadelphia and gets interested in a black actress who is credited as "The Watermelon Woman" in the film Plantation Memories and decides to make a documentary about her in order to know more about her. At the same time that she is beginning to know more about The Watermelon Woman -for example that she was a lesbian and that she may have had a relationship with the Plantation Memories director Martha Page-, she meets a girl, Diana, with which she begins a relationship, with the innaproval of her friend Tamara because “now Cheryl wants to be white, and Diana has a fetish for black …show more content…

After watching carefully and studying Janine, Greeting from Africa and The Watermelon Woman, I found a lot of this ‘Dunyementary’ characteristics: they all are filmed in a documentary way, they all have Cheryl Dunye’s talking monologue and narration, in them she talks about personal things and relationships, turning around two main themes: lesbian and black people -joining them in lesbian relationships of black people-, they mix reality and history and finally, at least in the three of them, she has a relationship with a white

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