The Watermelon Woman (1996) watch online

The Watermelon Woman is a 1996 American romantic comedy-drama film written, directed, and edited by Cheryl Dunye. The first feature film directed by a Black lesbian, it stars Dunye as Cheryl, a young Black lesbian working a day job in a video store while trying to make a film about Fae Richards, a Black actress from the 1930s known for playing the stereotypical "mammy" roles to which Black actresses were relegated during the period.

The Watermelon Woman was produced on a budget of $300,000, financed by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), as well as a fundraiser, and donations from friends of Dunye. The film was partly inspired by and dedicated to the memory of such Black actresses as Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel, and Butterfly McQueen. Fae Richards is a fictional character created by Dunye for the film as both an amalgam of and a stand-in for Black actresses sidelined or forgotten in film history, and as a result of the film's budget being unable to afford archive footage of real-life actresses.

The Watermelon Woman premiered at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival. The film received generally positive reviews and is considered a landmark in New Queer Cinema. It garnered controversy for a lesbian sex scene that prompted a writer for the conservative The Washington Times to question its NEA funding, which in turn led to Congressional complaints and contributed to the NEA restructuring their grant system toward project-specific awards instead of broad funding. In 2021, The Watermelon Woman was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

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