BAMPFA: Cheryl Dunye Selects!

Cheryl Dunye has been writing, directing, teaching, and producing movies for over three decades. This carte blanche series offers viewers the opportunity to see an assortment of movies she admires and to revisit her iconic early works. The lineup commences with Dunye’s genre-expanding, archive-inventing screwball comedy The Watermelon Woman and includes her innovative short films, all essential to the Queer New Wave cinema of the 1990s. Combining documentary techniques, vivid screenwriting, excellent performances (including by Dunye herself), humor, and pathos, these “Dunyementaries” explore Black and lesbian identities, desire, and relationships. Dunye will also present her compelling sophomore feature, Stranger Inside, recently presented as part of Jenni Olson’s Masc II series. The suspenseful prison drama is constructed around a Black woman’s quest for family and identity.

Dunye’s diverse selections include Lewis Seiler’s 1955 Women’s Prison—featuring Ida Lupino as a stylish and cruel prison warden—which she admires for “cracking open a space for queer and feminist subtext,” and actor/director Ivan Dixon’s chronicle of a Black CIA agent turned urban freedom fighter, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, for “starting a conversation about resistance that continues today.” Pre-Halloween treats include Milton Moses Ginsberg’s biting Nixon-era satire, The Werewolf of Washington—with Dean Stockwell as an afflicted presidential press attaché—and Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness, starring Delphine Seyrig as an elegant, ageless countess with a taste for blood and beautiful young women. Completing the series, Julien Schnabel’s depiction of the life of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, is lauded by Dunye for honoring “queer memory with lyrical, defiant beauty.”

— Kate MacKay, Film Curator

Check specific showtimes and tickets HERE.