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“Fae's life means hope, inspiration, and possibility; it means history! It means I am able to say that I am a Black lesbian filmmaker” (Dunye 1996). These lines appear near the end of Cheryl Dunye's trailblazing mockumentary, where she also stars as a wayward video store worker/filmmaker in search of a Black lesbian past. The Watermelon Woman was the first full-length feature film with a Black lesbian protagonist directed by an out Black lesbian. 1 Dunye's film, while hailed as “stimulating and funny” by the New York Times (Holden 1997), bombed at the box office, earning a little less than $9,000 on opening night 2. Some fifteen years later, in 2011, Dee Rees would also make Black lesbian film history as the second out Black lesbian filmmaker to release a full-length feature film with a Black lesbian protagonist in her coming-of-age story, Pariah. While Rees's film fared a bit better at the box office, it too failed to reap financial rewards on par with its critical success. While I am not suggesting that box office success equates with a film's quality or merit, I am suggesting that poor box office showings for films by Black directors or films focused on Black lead characters, regardless of critical acclaim, are often a death knell for more of those films being produced. At the same time, Black filmgoing audiences are often held accountable for a film's success or lack there-of, which belies the ways in which these films are sold and marketed to theaters and to the public, and the paucity of resources allocated to Black films. These strategies and assumptions often ignore the tensions in Black communities regarding what constitutes hegemonic Blackness and which Black films are supported and which ones are ignored.
Nevertheless, in 2011, cultural critic Nelson George asserted, “ Pariah is important, not simply as a promising directorial debut, but also as the most visible example of the mini-movement of young black filmmakers telling stories that complicate assumptions about what “black film” can be by embracing thorny issues of identity, alienation and sexuality.” However, filmgoers, myself included, were offended at the New York Times’ comparison of Pariah to Lee Daniel's Precious (2008), another “Black” movie, but with such radically different...