This achievement is especially impressive given that The Watermelon Woman wouldn’t receive a traditional theatrical domestic release until March 1997, years after this movement started. As paradoxical as it sounds, the very fact that The Watermelon Woman didn't feel like other New Queer Cinema entries made it the embodiment of the uniqueness that defined so many New Queer Cinema titles. The heavily meta nature of this story, not to mention its cognizance of classic cinema and nonchalant representation of queer people, embodied the very groundbreaking storytelling and filmmaking traits that kept cropping up in entries in the New Queer Cinema canon. This character scours the Earth for information on a Black actress who went uncredited for her role as "the Watermelon Woman" in a movie from the 1940s. Dunye played the lead character of this movie, a variation of herself also named Cheryl. Meanwhile, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman would prove to be an encapsulation of many of the qualities that defined New Queer Cinema. The 1994 feature Go Fish from Rose Troche was a relaxed movie about a collection of lesbians with varying personalities with the kind of snappy dialogue that feels right at home with other early 1990s indie auteurs like Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino. While certain titles from queer women directors couldn’t shatter all those double standards merely by existing, they did help at least fight back against these issues. In her essay, Rich notes that stories from queer male perspectives were getting preferential treatment in terms of being screened at film festivals and picked up for theatrical distribution. This phenomenon continued well into the 1990s, at which point a bit more diversity in terms of what kind of queer voices were getting uplifted began to emerge. With titles like Rebels, the global reach of New Queer Cinema, as well as how it could upend racial norms regarding queer representation, was established. This film was also notable for featuring a Black gay character, which was still a rarity even in the flourishing New Queer Cinema movement, let alone in the broader visual language of cinema as an artform. The New Queer Cinema movement wasn't limited to American films either, as, across the pond, director Isaac Julien featured a queer couple as one of the most prominent characters in his 1991 feature Young Soul Rebels. In these early years of the 1990s, other projects like Tom Kalin's Swoon would debut to further drum up conversation and expand the world's vision for what queer cinema could look like. The following year, Greg Araki would also hit a new level of prominence with the motion picture The Living End. That same year, Gus Van Sant would explode onto the filmmaking scene with My Own Private Idaho, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
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