Shaz Bennett

It’s high time we created a SPOTLGHT feature on trailblazing female filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. Her 1996 feature film debut, The Watermelon Woman, made history as the first feature-length narrative written and directed by an out Black lesbian about Black lesbians. Along with classics like My Own Private Idaho and Paris is Burning, the film is considered a seminal work of the Queer New Wave movement. Dunye quite literally invented a film genre, the “Dunyementary,” a style of cinema in which the lines of documentary, fiction, and personal life are blurred together. Many films, projects on the small screen, and art videography have been inspired by her work over the years. These projects, that center queerness or Blackness or both, would otherwise not exist.