In Arabic, kamil (كامل) means complete, perfect, whole. The Watermelon Woman proposes a queer kamil : not the completion of a puzzle, but the acceptance of the gap. Cheryl completes Fae not by finding her, but by becoming her. In the final scene, Cheryl speaks directly to the camera: “Sometimes you have to create your own history.” She then dedicates the film to Fae Richards, 1906–1977. That date of death is invented. But the act of naming, of giving a woman a death date when the industry gave her only a stereotype, is a kind of perfection. Why evoke the camel? In many Middle Eastern and North African traditions, the camel symbolizes endurance, memory, and the carrying of burdens across arid landscapes . The camel is a survival technology. It remembers the way home. It stores fat in its hump — not water, but energy for the long journey.
Cheryl Dunye made this film before the rise of digital archives, before #BlackWomenDirectors, before mainstream streaming. It remains urgent because the problem it diagnoses has not been solved. Hollywood still resists complex Black lesbian stories. Archives still underdocument queer life. But the matrix persists — in community, in celluloid, in the stubborn act of naming what was never named.
This is the film’s political core: For marginalized people, especially queer Black women, the official archive is a tool of erasure. Therefore, you must become an archivist of your own life. You must film your friends, record your mother’s stories, reenact what was never filmed. The matrix is not given; it is built. fylm The Watermelon Woman 1996 mtrjm kaml
In 1996, Cheryl Dunye released The Watermelon Woman — the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian. Shot on 16mm for a reported $300,000, it feels less like a polished period piece and more like a living artifact, a DIY mixtape of fiction and documentary. The film centers on Cheryl (played by Dunye herself), a young video store clerk and aspiring filmmaker in Philadelphia, who becomes obsessed with a shadowy figure from 1930s Hollywood: a Black actress credited only as “The Watermelon Woman” in films like Plantation Memories . Cheryl names her Fae Richards.
But the camel also stumbles. Cheryl’s research is amateurish. She gets things wrong. She projects her own desires onto Fae. The film does not hide this. In one scene, Cheryl interviews a Black lesbian elder who gently corrects her: “You young girls think you invented everything.” The camel must learn from older camels. The matrix requires intergenerational care. Dunye blends documentary and fiction so thoroughly that the viewer cannot fully separate them. Real archival footage of 1930s films sits beside reenactments. Real interviews with Dunye’s own mother and friends sit beside scripted scenes. The effect is to destabilize the authority of “fact” while reaffirming the authority of experience. In Arabic, kamil (كامل) means complete, perfect, whole
In the final minutes, Cheryl watches a clip of Fae Richards in Plantation Memories — the infamous “watermelon scene.” Fae’s character eats watermelon while smiling broadly, a racist trope. But Cheryl re-frames it: She notices Fae’s eyes flickering away from the camera, toward someone off-screen. Cheryl reads that glance as a sign of Fae’s interiority, her secret life. That one frame, that half-second of resistance, becomes the whole film’s anchor. From a racist stereotype, Dunye extracts a queer gaze. The Watermelon Woman ends not with closure but with continuation. Cheryl’s film-within-the-film is finished, but we know Fae will remain largely unknown. The “mtrjm kaml” of the title — a broken cipher for matrix and kamil — suggests that wholeness is not the absence of rupture but the willingness to work inside rupture .
Dunye’s genius is to . Cheryl never finds a lost masterpiece by Fae. She never finds a letter where Fae declares her politics. What she finds is a phonograph record, a few stills, a passing mention in a gossip column, and the memory of Lee. Fae’s story remains incomplete — but that incompleteness is the point. The film argues that fragments are a form of wholeness when the whole was never allowed to exist. In the final scene, Cheryl speaks directly to
The Watermelon Woman is a long piece of love, a hump full of memory, a perfect fragment. And for those who know how to watch, Fae Richards is still glancing away from the camera, toward us, telling us to keep going.
