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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 .
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. fylm The Watermelon Woman 1996 mtrjm kaml
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. In the final minutes, Cheryl watches a clip
