Shoestring production (16mm, plus periodic video transfers), with tall ambitions. A black lesbian video-store clerk and would-be filmmaker undertakes a documentary on the life of a little-known (fictitious, actually) black actress of the Thirties, and at the same time undertakes an interracial romance. The procedure of the film-within-the-film is completely unconvincing (why waste footage on man-in-the-street interviews when even a scholar of the African-American Cinema has never heard of the actress?), and the fruits of the research are too good to be true. The so-called Watermelon Woman was herself a lesbian in an interracial romance. Cheryl Dunye, who stars as well as directs, is a winning personality despite an emoting style limited to self-conscious eye-rolls, and she comes in for plenty of underdog sympathies. Camille Paglia makes a cameo appearance (as herself), characteristically combative in defense of the "mammy" stereotype. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd