Film screening: The Watermelon Woman

Friday, 09. 06 2018 at 13,00 at the museum’s cinema theater

The Watermelon Woman is part of the program of the PrideWeek and will be permanently on show within the exhibition Del LaGrace Volcano: Corus Queer (from June 07. through September 10. 2018)

Director: Cheryl Dunye , USA, 1996 (90’)

WITH: Cheryl Dunye (Cheryl), Valarie Walker (Tamara), Guinevere Turner (Diana) and Lisa Marie Bronson (Fae Richards/The Watermelon Woman)

Cheryl is a twenty-something black lesbian working in a video store, while struggling to make a film about an obscure black actress from the 1930’s, known only as “the Watermelon Woman”. Research reveals that the Watermelon Woman is Fae Richards, a Philadelphia-based nightclub singer and sometime lover of Martha Page, the white lesbian director who discovered her. At the same time, Cheryl falls in love with a cute white customer at the video store.

The Watermelon Woman, marked by film historians and queer theorists as one of the first New Queer Cinema pieces, dives into the complexities of race and sex and all the consequent social identities, reimagining classic Hollywood in an astonishingly fresh, stimulating and funny manner. The open-hearted Cheryl Dunye builds a faux-cinema-verite as a semi-autobiographical story about a version of herself.

Awards: Teddy Award, 1996 Berlinale