The Watermelon Woman (1997) on Netflix
NR19971h 25mComedyDramaRomance
Cheryl, a 25-year-old Black lesbian, holds a day job at a Philadelphia video store. A mammy role credited only as the Watermelon Woman sends her looking for the actress behind it.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.1/105,265 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
At a Philadelphia video store, Cheryl, 25, watches films of the 1930s and 1940s that cast Black actresses, many of them uncredited. In Plantation Memories a mammy part is credited only as the Watermelon Woman, and Cheryl sets out to make a documentary about who she was. She interviews her mother, who remembers the woman singing in Philadelphia clubs, Lee Edwards, an expert on African-American cinema, and Shirley, a friend of her mother. Cheryl also begins dating Diana, a white lesbian who comes to the video store.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Watermelon Woman (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Representative Peter Hoekstra wrote to NEA chairwoman Jane Alexander calling the film evidence of "the serious possibility that taxpayer money is being used to fund the production and distribution of patently offensive and possibly pornographic movies". A spokesperson said Hoekstra objected only to explicit sex, and the controversy led the NEA to fund specific projects instead of arts groups.
- The Watermelon Woman was the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian, and Dunye stars in it as Cheryl, a young Black lesbian who works in a video store and tries to make a film about Fae Richards, a 1930s Black actress known for the "mammy" roles Black actresses were then relegated to.
- Dunye's research at the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the Library of Congress turned up neither the resources she wanted nor anything within her budget, so she staged 78 of the film's archival photographs. She and Leonard shot new footage meant to resemble 1930s films, and playwright Ira Jeffries took additional photographs in the same style.
SPOILER
The film was partly inspired by and dedicated to the memory of Black actresses Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen; its fictional 1930s star Fae Richards is Dunye's amalgam of and stand-in for Black actresses sidelined or forgotten in film history. Dunye invented her partly because the budget could not afford archive footage of real-life actresses.- New York City photographer Zoe Leonard created the film's photographic Fae Richards Archive, 78 images documenting the fictional actress's life. The collection was later exhibited in galleries and as a book, and some of the photos were auctioned off as a fundraiser to fund the film's production.
- The Watermelon Woman was selected in 2021 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, which deemed it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
