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Movies like The Watermelon Woman

Key Features:
LGBTQ+, Independent film, Filmmaking, Identity, Representation, British cinema, Historical revisionism, Social commentary, Romance, Mystery, Cultural identity, Self-discovery, 1930s, Race relations, Hidden past
Tone:
serious, humorous, earnest
Target Audience:
Film buffs, Socially conscious viewers, LGBTQ+ community, Independent film enthusiasts
Emotional Arc:
Intrigue → Reflection

The Watermelon Woman

1997-03-05
The Watermelon Woman Poster - Find Similar Movies

A young black lesbian filmmaker probes into the life of The Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played 'mammy' archetypes.

Genres
Drama, Comedy, Romance
Cast
Cheryl Dunye, Guinevere Turner, Valarie Walker, Lisa Marie Bronson, Cheryl Clarke, Irene Dunye, Brian Freeman, Ira Jeffries, Alexandra Juhasz, Camille Paglia
Crew
Cheryl Dunye, Cheryl Dunye
Rating
6.8(107 votes)
The Watermelon WomanThe Watermelon Woman
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Watermelon Man
6.3

A racist insurance agent lives in a typical suburban neighborhood, but his bigoted world of taunting and harassing black people on and off the job is turned upside down when his skin inexplicably turns dark overnight.



Auntie Mame
7

Mame Dennis, a progressive and independent woman of the 1920s, is left to care for her nephew Patrick after his wealthy father dies. Conflict ensues when the executor of the father's estate objects to the aunt's lifestyle and tries to force her to send Patrick to prep school.



Lady Chatterley's Lover

After a crippling injury leaves her husband impotent, Lady Chatterly is torn between her love for her husband and her physical desires. With her husband's consent, she seeks out other means of fulfilling her needs.



Belle
Belle(2013)
7.107

Dido Elizabeth Bell, the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy admiral, plays an important role in the campaign to abolish slavery in England.



Lady Chatterley
6.1

After a crippling injury leaves her husband impotent, Lady Chatterly is torn between her love for her husband and her physical desires. With her husband's consent, she seeks out other means of fulfilling her needs.



Kim Ji-young, Born 1982

Kim Ji-young, an ordinary woman in her 30s, suddenly shows signs of being inhabited by other women from her life, past and present.



Diary of a Mad Black Woman

Charles, an attorney, and Helen, his devoted wife, seem to have everything – money, a beautiful mansion – the American Dream. However, as Helen prepares to celebrate their 18th wedding anniversary, her life takes an unexpected twist when she comes home to find her clothes packed up in a U-Haul van parked in the driveway. Charles is divorcing her and kicks her out. Helen moves in with her grandmother Madea, an old woman who doesn't take any lip from anyone. Madea helps Helen through these tough times by showing her what is really important in life. Helen is forced to rediscover love, life, and religion in her pursuit for happiness.



Passing
Passing(2021)
6.257

In 1920s New York City, a Black woman finds her world upended when her life becomes intertwined with a former childhood friend who's passing as white.



Agathe Cléry
4.812

Agathe Clery, a marketing manager for a cosmetics company, is snobbish, stubborn and racist. When she is diagnosed with Addison Syndrome, an disorder that darkens the pigmentation of one's skin, she suddenly finds herself resembling a black woman.



Shirley Valentine
6.2

Wondering what has happened to herself, now feeling stagnant and in a rut, Shirley Valentine finds herself regularly talking to the wall while preparing her husband's chips and egg. When her best friend wins a trip-for-two to Greece Shirley begins to see the world, and herself, in a different light.



The Help
The Help(2011)
8.2

Aibileen Clark is a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson is an African-American maid who has often offended her employers despite her family's struggles with money and her desperate need for jobs; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college to find out her childhood maid has mysteriously disappeared. These three stories intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help"; yet they are always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines.



Imagine Me & You
7.6

During her wedding ceremony, Rachel notices Luce in the audience and feels instantly drawn to her. The two women become close friends, and when Rachel learns that Luce is a lesbian, she realizes that despite her happy marriage to Heck, she is falling for Luce. As she questions her sexual orientation, Rachel must decide between her stable relationship with Heck and her exhilarating new romance with Luce.



The Color Purple

A decades-spanning tale of love and resilience and of one woman's journey to independence. Celie faces many hardships in her life, but ultimately finds extraordinary strength and hope in the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.



Ammonite
Ammonite(2020)
6.9

In 1840s England, palaeontologist Mary Anning and a young woman sent by her husband to convalesce by the sea develop an intense relationship. Despite the chasm between their social spheres and personalities, Mary and Charlotte discover they can each offer what the other has been searching for: the realisation that they are not alone. It is the beginning of a passionate and all-consuming love affair that will defy all social bounds and alter the course of both lives irrevocably.



Mrs. Dalloway
5.5

Clarissa Dalloway looks back on her youth as she readies for a gathering at her house. The wife of a legislator and a doyenne of London's upper-crust party scene, Clarissa finds that the plight of ailing war veteran Septimus Warren Smith reminds her of a past romance with Peter Walsh. In flashbacks, young Clarissa explores her possibilities with Peter.



Manderlay
Manderlay(2005)
6.9

In 1933, a young woman and her father discover an Alabama plantation whose inhabitants live as if slavery had never been abolished. Feeling a sense of duty to those behind the heavy gates, she stays to liberate the people and see them through their first harvest. With four of her father's colleagues and a lawyer, she faces the daunting task of resurrecting the place known as Manderlay.



Vita & Virginia
6.769

Socialite Vita Sackville-West and literary icon Virginia Woolf run in different circles in 1920s London. Despite the odds, the two forge an unconventional affair, set against the backdrop of their own strikingly contemporary marriages.



Starlet
Starlet(2012)
6.8

An unlikely friendship forms between 21 year-old Jane and the elderly Sadie after Jane discovers a hidden stash of money inside an object at Sadie's yard sale.



Nappily Ever After
7.197

After an accident at the hair salon, Violet realizes she's not living life to the fullest. A soulful barber helps her put the pieces back together.



Bimboland
Bimboland(1998)
4.3

A shy French anthropologist who happens to be secretly in love with her college superior, chooses "bimbos" as the subject of her thesis. She becomes one of them in order to do that, and the professor she loves falls for her new identity.



The Lion Woman
6.848

Eva Arctander is born with hypertrichosis, meaning that she is covered from head to toe with fine blonde hair. Her father is so ashamed of her that he hides her away from the world in their apartment. However, Eva’s nanny fights for her right to be treated like everyone else.



Rambling Rose
6.138

Rose is taken in by the Hillyer family to serve as a 1930s housemaid so that she can avoid falling into a life of prostitution. Her appearence and personality is such that all men fall for her, and she knows it. She can't help herself from getting into trouble with men.



The Artist
7.5

Hollywood, 1927: As silent movie star George Valentin wonders if the arrival of talking pictures will cause him to fade into oblivion, he sparks with Peppy Miller, a young dancer set for a big break.



Desert Hearts
7

While waiting for her divorce papers, a repressed literature professor finds herself unexpectedly attracted by a carefree, spirited young woman named Cay.



Tim
Tim(1979)
6.195

Handsome but backward gardener Tim Melville has a new woman in his life. She is Mary, his widowed employer, a woman who had given up on love until she had found Tim. At first they are friends. But soon they become lovers, as Mary, drawn to Tim's innocence and magnetism, begins to teach him all about life - and love.



Alice
Alice(2022)
5.734

Alice spends her days enslaved on a rural Georgia plantation, restlessly yearning for freedom. After a violent clash with plantation owner Paul, Alice flees through the neighboring woods and stumbles onto the unfamiliar sight of a highway, soon discovering the year is actually 1973.



Sylvie's Love
6.163

When a young woman meets an aspiring saxophonist in her father’s record shop in 1950s Harlem, their love ignites a sweeping romance that transcends changing times, geography, and professional success.



Margarita with a Straw

A rebellious young woman with cerebral palsy leaves India to study in New York. On her journey of self-discovery, she unexpectedly falls in love.



Leading Lady Parts
7.8

The best women of British acting go to an audition for a dream role, primed to take on the role of a lifetime: that complex woman, the strong woman, a woman for today.



The Makeover
5.538

This is an update of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" that changes the genders of the main characters. Hannah Higgins attempts to turn blue-collar Boston beer vendor Elliot Doolittle into a viable candidate and inadvertently learns something of Elliot's side of life.



The Human Stain
6

Coleman Silk is a worldly and admired professor who loses his job after unwittingly making a racial slur. To clear his name, Silk writes a book about the events with his friend and colleague Nathan Zuckerman, who in the process discovers a dark secret Silk has hidden his whole life. All the while, Silk engages in an affair with Faunia Farley, a younger woman whose tormented past threatens to unravel the layers of deception Silk has constructed.



Gray Matters
5.8

Sam and Gray are such a well-matched pair that it is difficult to believe they are brother and sister rather than husband and wife. They both share a love of 1940s movies and dancing, and when they meet Charlie, they have something else in common: They both fall in love with her. Sam must deal with unexpected feelings of jealousy, while Gray struggles to come to terms with her sexual orientation.



Black and White
5.331

Racial integration is Elena's profession and passion, not only filling her working day as a cultural mediator assisting immigrants, but spilling over into her home life as well. All too often her husband Carlo must attend charity events where he feels distinctly out of place. During one of these evenings, Carlo meets Nadine, a beautiful black woman.



The Woman
The Woman(2011)
6

A lawyer puts his family in jeopardy when he captures the last member of a violent clan and tries to forcibly tame her.



Tell It to the Bees
7.498

Dr. Jean Markham returns to the town she left as a teenager to take over her late father's medical practice. When a school-yard scuffle lands Charlie in her surgery, she invites him to visit the hives in her garden and tell his secrets to the bees, as she once did. The new friendship between the boy and the bee keeper brings his mother Lydia into Jean's world.



Secrets & Lies
7.6

After her adoptive mother dies, Hortense, a successful black optometrist, seeks out her birth mother. She's shocked when her research leads her to Cynthia, a working class white woman.



All About Nina
5.918

Nina Geld's passion and talent have made her a rising star in the comedy scene, but she's an emotional mess offstage. When a new professional opportunity coincides with a romantic one, she is forced to confront her own deeply troubled past.



Fried Green Tomatoes
7.682

Amidst her own personality crisis, a southern housewife meets an outgoing old woman who tells her the story of Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison, two young women who experienced hardships and love in 1920s Whistle Stop, Alabama.



Antebellum
6.2

Successful author Veronica finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality and must uncover the mind-bending mystery before it's too late.



The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

A lesbian in the 1800s who keeps a detailed account of her life written in coded diaries attempts to live independently while juggling an affair with a married woman.



The World Unseen
7.077

A drama centered on two women who engage in a dangerous relationship during South Africa's apartheid era.



Lady Chatterley's Lover

After a crippling injury leaves her husband impotent, Lady Chatterly is torn between her love for her husband and her physical desires. With her husband's consent, she seeks out other means of fulfilling her needs.



A Taste of Honey
6.9

While out to avoid spending time with her narcissistic and promiscuous mother, sixteen-year-old Jo has a brief affair that leaves her pregnant and abandoned. When her mother remarries, Jo's only support becomes her friend Geoffrey, a homosexual.



The Parisian Bitch
5.802

Thirty-year-old Camilla, realizes that she doesn't have the life she deserves and decides that the only destiny worthy of her is that of a royal princess.



Shadows
Shadows(1960)
6.9

The relationship between Lelia, a light-skinned black woman, and Tony, a white man is put in jeopardy when Tony meets Lelia’s darker-skinned jazz singer brother, Hugh, and discovers that her racial heritage is not what he thought it was.



Sibel
Sibel(2019)
6.7

25-year-old Sibel lives with her father and sister in a secluded village in the mountains of Turkey’s Black Sea region. Sibel is a mute, but she communicates by using the ancestral whistled language of the area.



Better Than Chocolate

Not long after moving into her own place, Maggie finds herself with two unsolicited roommates: her recently divorced mother, Lila, and her young brother. The timing is especially bad, considering Maggie has fallen hard for an attractive woman, Kim, only hours before they move in. What could be a nonissue becomes increasingly complicated -- since Maggie's family is unaware of her sexual orientation, and Maggie is not open to sharing that information.



Juanita
Juanita(2019)
5.4

Fed up with her deadbeat grown kids and marginal urban existence, Juanita takes a Greyhound bus to Paper Moon, Montana - where she reinvents herself and finds her mojo.



Summerland
7.5

A woman during the Second World War opens her heart to an evacuee after initially resolving to be rid of him.



The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love

An adventurous love story between two young women of different social and economic backgrounds who find themselves going through all the typical struggles of a new romance.



Mrs. Henderson Presents

Eccentric 70-year-old widow purchases the Windmill Theatre in London as a post-widowhood hobby. After starting an innovative continuous variety review, which is copied by other theaters, they begin to lose money. Mrs. Henderson suggests they add female nudity similar to the Moulin Rouge in Paris.



Hidden Figures
8.1

The untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson – brilliant African-American women working at NASA and serving as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history – the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.



Irma Vep
Irma Vep(1996)
6.666

Hong Kong action diva Maggie Cheung comes to France when a past-his-prime director casts her in a remake of the silent classic Les Vampires. Clad in a rubber catsuit and unable to speak a word of French, Cheung finds herself adrift in the insanity of the film industry…



Suffragette
7.201

Based on true events about the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State.



Bye Bye Blondie
5.508

A love story of two women who meet up in their late forties and attempt to retrieve the romance they had in their youth.



Albert Nobbs
6.354

Albert Nobbs struggles to survive in late 19th century Ireland, where women aren't encouraged to be independent. Posing as a man, so she can work as a butler in Dublin's most posh hotel, Albert meets a handsome painter and looks to escape the lie she has been living.



An Unmarried Woman
6.675

A wealthy woman from Manhattan's Upper East Side struggles to deal with her new identity and her sexuality after her husband of 16 years leaves her for a younger woman.



Josephine
Josephine(2013)
5.852

Josephine doesn't like her job and keeps on having relationships without a future. Her sister and parents keep pushing her to find a good husband. To shut them up, she creates a handsome Brazilian millionaire but her little white lie has a flip side - she loses everything to find the love of her life.



Mississippi Masala
6.319

Years after her Indian family was forced to flee their home in Uganda, twentysomething Mina finds herself helping to run a motel in the faraway land of Mississippi. It's there that a passionate romance with the charming Black carpet cleaner Demetrius challenges the prejudices of their conservative families and exposes the rifts between the region's Indian and African American communities.



Moolaadé
Moolaadé(2004)
7.158

When a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female genital mutilation, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.



Peeples
Peeples(2013)
5.6

Hoping to propose to his upper-crust girlfriend, Wade Walker crashes her family's annual reunion and lands in a face-off with her dad.



Georgy Girl
6.2

A homely but vivacious young woman dodges the amorous attentions of her father's middle-aged employer while attempting to please her glamorously stuck-up roommate Meredith.



Day of the Woman

A young, beautiful career woman rents a backwoods cabin to write her first novel. Attacked by a group of local lowlifes and left for dead, she devises a horrific plan to inflict revenge.



My Fair Lady
7.5

A snobbish phonetics professor agrees to a wager that he can take a flower girl and make her presentable in high society.



Sonny Boy
Sonny Boy(2011)
6.538

Waldemar Nods, a young man from Suriname, meets the older Dutch woman Rika van der Lans and they fall in love. In pre-WWII Netherlands they could not be more different. The one black, the other white, 17 years between them and on top of that Rika already has four children with another man. They love each other, but then Rika appears to be pregnant.



Bye Bye Morons
7.2

When 43-year-old hairdresser Suze Trappet finds out that she's seriously ill, she decides to go looking for a child she was forced to abandon when she was only 15. On her madcap bureaucratic quest she crosses paths with JB, a 50-year-old man in the middle of a burnout, and Mr. Blin, a blind archivist prone to overenthusiasm. The unlikely trio set off on a hilarious and poignant helterskelter journey across the city in search of Suze's long-lost child.



Fanny Lye Deliver'd

On an isolated English farm in 1657, Fanny lives a quiet life with her oppressive husband John and their young son. One day their life is rocked with the arrival of young couple Thomas and Rebecca who claim to have been robbed and need a place to stay. But are these strangers really who they say they are?



Skin
Skin(2008)
6.39

Based on the true story of a black girl who was born to two white Afrikaner parents in South Africa during the apartheid era.



J.T. LeRoy
5.4

A young woman named Savannah Knoop spends six years pretending to be a transgender writer named JT Leroy, the made-up literary persona of her sister-in-law.



The Entertainer
6.2

Archie Rice, an old-time British vaudeville performer sinking into final defeat, schemes to stay in show business.



The Rain People
6.5

When a housewife finds out she is pregnant, she runs out of town looking for freedom to reevaluate her life decisions.



The Color Purple
7.7

An epic tale spanning forty years in the life of Celie, an African-American woman living in the South who survives incredible abuse and bigotry. After Celie's abusive father marries her off to the equally debasing 'Mister' Albert Johnson, things go from bad to worse, leaving Celie to find companionship anywhere she can. She perseveres, holding on to her dream of one day being reunited with her sister in Africa.



Easy Virtue
6.4

A young Englishman marries a glamorous American. When he brings her home to meet the parents, she arrives like a blast from the future - blowing their entrenched British stuffiness out the window.



Paprika
Paprika(1991)
7.141

Mimma starts working in Madame Colette’s brothel to help her boyfriend financially. There she is rechristened “Paprika,” and falls in love with her first client, naval officer Franco. Despite this attraction, she begins her climb through the sex trade, residing in Italy’s most illustrious brothels.



The Blue Caftan
7.274

A middle-aged tailor and his wife find their relationship challenged by the arrival of a handsome new apprentice.



To Each, Her Own

Just as Simone works up the courage to tell her conservative Jewish family she's a lesbian, she finds herself attracted to a male Senegalese chef.



Identification of a Woman

Movie director Niccolò has just been left by his wife. Subsequently he embarks on an obsessive relationship with a young woman who eventually leaves him and disappears while searching for her, he meets a variety of other willing girls. This gives him the idea of making a movie about women's relationships. He starts to search for a woman who can play the leading part in the movie.



The World to Come

In 1856, two women forge a close connection despite their isolation on the American frontier.



The Ape Woman
7.276

A modest Neapolitan man meets a young woman with excessive hairiness. He exhibits her at fairs and marries her. It is after marriage that he receives a tempting offer from a French manager.



The Long Walk Home
7.64

Two women, black and white, in 1955 Montgomery Alabama, must decide what they are going to do in response to the famous bus boycott led by Martin Luther King.



Disclosure
7.805

An investigation of how Hollywood's fabled stories have deeply influenced how Americans feel about transgender people, and how transgender people have been taught to feel about themselves.



3 Women
3 Women(1977)
7.098

Two co-workers, one a vain woman and the other an awkward teenager, share an increasingly bizarre relationship after becoming roommates.



The Souvenir
6.1

A shy but ambitious film student falls into an intense, emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man.



The Brass Teapot
6.1

When a couple discovers that a brass teapot makes them money whenever they hurt themselves, they must come to terms with how far they are willing to go.



Seance on a Wet Afternoon

Working-class British housewife Myra Savage reinvents herself as a medium, holding seances in the sitting room of her home with the hidden assistance of her under-employed, asthmatic husband, Billy. In an attempt to enhance her credibility as a psychic, Myra hatches an elaborate, ill-conceived plot to kidnap a wealthy couple's young daughter so that she can then help the police "find" the missing girl.



Lemonade
Lemonade(2016)
8.4

The second "visual album" (a collection of short films) by Beyoncé, this time around she takes a piercing look at racial issues and feminist concepts through a sexualized, satirical, and solemn tone.



Steam: The Turkish Bath

Francesco and Marta run a husband-and-wife design company in Rome. When Francesco's aunt dies in Istanbul he travels there to sort out the hamam Turkish steam bath that she left him. He finds a love and warmth in his relatives' Istanbul home that is missing from his life in Italy.



Violette Nozière
6.673

Paris, 1933. The daughter of a respectable lower middle class couple, Violette Nozière, leads a disreputable double life. Far from being the innocent 18-year-old her parents mistake her for, she spends her nights with dissolute young men in the less salubrious areas of the city.



Water
Water(2005)
6.8

The year is 1938, and Mahatma Gandhi's groundbreaking philosophies are sweeping across India, but 8-year-old Chuyia, newly widowed, must go to live with other outcast widows on an ashram. Her presence transforms the ashram as she befriends two of her compatriots.



The Color of Pomegranates

The life of the revered 18th-century Armenian poet and musician Sayat-Nova. Portraying events in the life of the artist from childhood up to his death, the movie addresses in particular his relationships with women, including his muse. The production tells Sayat-Nova's dramatic story by using both his poems and largely still camerawork, creating a work hailed as revolutionary by Mikhail Vartanov.



Imitation of Life
7.5

In 1940s New York, a white widow who dreams of being on Broadway has a chance encounter with a black single mother, who becomes her maid.



A Romantic Comedy
4.63

Bored with her life and inspired by a friend's wedding, Esra quits her job and dumps her boyfriend, leading to a series of romantic misadventures.



Poor Things
7.655

Brought back to life by an unorthodox scientist, a young woman runs off with a lawyer on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, she grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.



Women in Love
6.5

Growing up in the sheltered confines of a 1920s English coal-mining community, free-spirited sisters Gudrun and Ursula explore erotic love with a wealthy playboy and a philosophical educator, with cataclysmic results for all four.



Gosford Park
6.8

In 1930s England, a group of pretentious rich and famous gather together for a weekend of relaxation at a hunting resort. But when a murder occurs, each one of these interesting characters becomes a suspect.



Summertime
6.7

In 1971, a young woman moves from the French countryside to Paris and begins a passionate love affair with a feminist leader.



Below Her Mouth
6.791

An unexpected affair quickly escalates into a heart-stopping reality for two women whose passionate connection changes their lives forever.



Carmen & Lola
6.969

Carmen is a gypsy teenager, destined to live a life that is repeated every generation: getting married and raising as many children as possible. But one day she meets Lola, an uncommon gypsy who dreams about going to university, does graffiti and is very different. Carmen quickly develops a complicity with Lola and discovers a world that, inevitably, leads them to be rejected by their families.



Caramel
Caramel(2007)
6.893

In a beauty salon in Beirut the lives of five women cross paths. The beauty salon is a colorful and sensual microcosm where they share and entrust their hopes, fears and expectations.

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