Creator and director of the film "The Watermelon Woman" Cheryl Dunye spoke about her film in progress, "Stranger Inside" last night.
Dunye's upcoming film depicts the story of a mother and daughter who meet in prison and will be presented in her personal "Dunyementary" style, a mix of documentary, pseudo-documentary and narrative techniques.
During her speech Dunye discussed the process of her research, which included talking to actual inmates as well as researching through archives and the Library of Congress.
In her effort to make the film "as close to the truth as possible," Dunye workshopped her script with inmates, reading the script with them, and actually talked to several mother-daughter pairs in prisons.
Dunye also showed a short documentary about the workshopping process that she had with the inmates at several Minnesota prisons.
Dunye modeled the film after the book "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," by Harriet Jacobs. Dunye seeks to tell the story of the "invisible women" in society, who are often overlooked by the media, she said. Dunye said many films about male prisons such as "The Green Mile" have been made recently, but there have been no serious films about women in prisons.
Dunye said that she did not want the film to be about class politics, but wanted to focus on the real-life experiences.
During her research she found archives of old mugshots of women and plans to include several in the film, as the photos remind us that the prisoners are real people, very similar to those we know.
Dunye is currently in residence at Hamilton College. She received an MFA from Rutgers University and a BA from Temple University.
The speech was sponsored by the Afro-American Society, the Coordinator for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Advocacy and Programming, The Shabazz African American Center and the Women's Resource Center.
