By Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier

When writer-director Cheryl Dunye casts her mind back to the mid-1990s, the period in which she made her landmark indie feature The Watermelon Woman, she recalls a landscape defined by absence. "There was no African-American lesbian narrative work, really, out there in long form," she ponders. The start of her directorial journey began in 1994, a time when the genesis of a Black lesbian feature film had no established funding pipeline, and no obvious distributors.

Up to this point, Dunye had been producing video art and short films, which had been presented at art galleries and other exhibition spaces. Her eight-minute short Greetings from Africa had screened in the Panorama section of the 1995 Berlinale International Film Festival, where she took a characteristically direct approach to financing her next project.

"I went with little posters, saying, ‘Hi, I'm Cheryl Dunye. I'm looking for funding for my script, The Watermelon Woman. Is there anybody here to help me?’" She suspects that someone followed her throughout the festival and removed all of her posters without her seeing. As such, Dunye came home empty-handed.

What followed was an act of self-determination, as the director secured a $31,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts with the assistance of producer Alexandra Juhasz. From there she began shooting, in a time long before Kickstarter existed, meaning that Dunye’s approach to securing the rest of the film’s budget was simply ask everyone they knew for five dollars – and anything else they could spare.

"There was a huge culture war going on,” Dunye recalls of the period, “so we just did it ourselves: as a political statement, and as an act of liberation for Black lesbian cinema."

At the heart of the film is Fae “The Watermelon Woman” Richards, a fictional Black actress from the early twentieth century whose film archive Dunye's character sets out to uncover. The invented archive was a narrative element born of necessity, as no licensable archive of Black queer life from this point in history available to the public.

"There was no recording of African-American queer life at this time period," Dunye elaborates. "There was no writing of books about it." Working from her own research and collaborating with artist Zoe Leonard, Dunye and her team constructed images of a life that never existed, fabricating photographs that have since been exhibited in major galleries worldwide. As Dunye puts it, "We created an archive for the archive.”

Following its summary rejection by numerous American festivals, the finished film found its way to Berlin – where it ultimately won the TEDDY Award for Best Feature in 1996. Dunye remembers the evening vividly as a punk-rock atmosphere with pink fur on the walls, and, herself at thirty, wearing a mesh top with little preparation for her victory that evening.

"I had no idea. I never won for the fruits of my labour in such a big way," she reflects brightly today. "So I was sort of dumbfounded for a moment on stage." Among those in attendance at the ceremony was late filmmaker Barbara Hammer – the subject of this year’s TEDDY AWARD-winner for Best Documentary, Barbara Forever – who captured the win on-camera. The footage was only recently returned to Dunye, prompting a fresh flood of vibrant and exuberant memories.  

Yet the expected doors did not swing open following her win at Berlin. No distribution deal materialised; no agents called. "Very few flowers were thrown that we thought would be thrown," Dunye says somewhat dourly. "In today's terms, it was sort of a quiet storm." The significance of the award would grow slowly, however, gathering greater cultural momentum across the film's tenth, twentieth, and now thirtieth anniversaries.

The broader cultural landscape, too, moved at a glacial pace. Dunye notes that it took well over a decade until another Black lesbian narrative feature – Dee Rees's Pariah, from 2011 – reached audiences in any mainstream capacity. "So that tells you that it's not on the agenda of anybody else," Dunye surmises.

In the intervening decades, Dunye spent several years directing episodic television, an experience that ultimately brought her back to independent filmmaking with renewed clarity. Today, however, Dunye sees unmistakable echoes of the period in which The Watermelon Woman was made.

"We're back in the same space," she says. "Cycles happen again. Dictators have happened throughout history, and we've done the work to stand up and use culture as our weapon." As such, the imperative behind her work in the mid-1990s remains much the same as it is in the mid-2020s: "We must archive our lives, once again, to show that we existed."

Dunye remains true to her word, with a new feature starring Laverne Cox shooting in the San Francisco Bay Area. Titled Black Is Blue, the film will serve as an homage to Sunset Boulevard – and, like The Watermelon Woman before it, financing has represented a familiar struggle. Yet Dunye sees mounting energy in a rising wave of international co-productions and young filmmakers collaborating across borders.

"I think people are realising you can't use the systems, and you have to do it for yourselves," she says. "Marginality is our strength. I think that's how it is when you're filmmaking: if your message is strong, if people click with it, just do it! That's one thing that people really are excited about, that we keep doing it – and I'm happy to be a part of that.”

Three decades on from its scrappy, self-funded origins, The Watermelon Woman carries a message that Dunye feels is as vital now as it was in 1996: "You have to make your own history. You have to show up for yourself. Nobody's gonna do it for you."