The Belcourt’s Weekend Classics offer something special on Saturday with a 2K HD restoration of 1996’s The Watermelon Woman. Queer black woman Cheryl Dunye wrote and directed the film, in which she plays a video store clerk and aspiring filmmaker in search of a documentary subject. She comes across fictitious 1930s actress Fae Richards — “the most beautiful black mammy,” as Dunye tells her audience in narration. Credited only as “The Watermelon Woman,” Richards played a mythologized character popular in the era: a slave woman who loved the master’s children even more than her own. Using a mishmash of documentary styles, The Watermelon Woman blurs the line between documentary and drama, while Dunye’s character archives something that still exists 20 years later: the invisibility and erasure of queer black women in film. July 28-29 at the Belcourt, 2102 Belcourt Ave. ERICA CICCARONE
The Watermelon Woman
