The film Watermelon Women is a film that was one of the first of its time. The film is classified as an “Indie” film because it was independently funded and was a very low budget film. Cheryl is both the main character and the film director. Cheryl is on a journey to become a film maker but the only problem is that she doesn’t know what she wants to make a movie about. She is an African American woman that is lesbian living in Philadelphia and she realizes that there are no movies about women like her. When this movie was made there had been barely any African American actors and actresses appearing in films, so once Cheryl finds a movie she rents from the movie rental store she works at that has this African American women in it named The Watermelon Women she latches on to this lady and decides to make a movie about her. Once she finds out that the actress is also a lesbian Cheryl sees herself in her. She finds herself in media and finds someone that is very similar to her. Cheryl starts to get obsessed over finding out more about The Watermelon Women that she starts to lose relationships in her personal life. her friend Tamara calls her out for not being satisfied with who she is and wanting to be someone else. Her love interest is a more masculine and tries to act African American and I think that’s one of the reasons Cheryl is attracted to her. She’s uncertain about her life style. This journey that Cheryl takes to find out who The Watermelon Women is can be looked at as her trying to find her true identity. Cheryl is confused about her identity because African Americans or LGBT people were not represented in American film industry at that time. Cheryl uses cinema in a way to create and validate her personal identity. At the end of the movie we find out that The Watermelon Women was never a real person. The Watermelon Women was made out of Cheryl’s imagination so that validates that Cheryl was trying to make a point that African American LGBT were not present in the film industry. She was also using this film project as a way to understand herself better. Cheryl learns to accept who she is and learns that it is important to embrace your differences. The director Cheryl Dunye brings awareness to the changing times of having African American lesbians in the film industry. She creates a name for herself for making an Indie film that caused awareness to its viewers.

In the film Perfumed Nightmare we follow the journey of a young man that is from the Philippines and his journey outside of his homeland. Kidlat travels to Paris where he gets to experience life in a progressive city. This film was very interesting to watch but it was a little unclear as to why it was a Third Cinema. A scene that stood out to me the most was the ending scene that played right before the credits. The end scene where Kidlat takes off in that spaceship like structure thing can be interpreted in many different ways. In class we discussed about it representing Kidlat not being satisfied with his home country but also not being satisfied with the new world he has encountered. This scene is important because we see the main character make the realization that his home town and the more enhanced country are not satisfying. His home country doesn’t have the technology or modern day machinery that helps everyday life. He wants to enhance his town and make it a better place by giving them things that other countries already have. For example, Kidlat mentions to the people of his town that he would make it rich in America so he could get his town a stop light for the bridge. This shows that the underdevelopment happening in third world countries is frustrating to him. Once Kidlat arrives in Paris he realizes that Paris is very developed and is growing bigger every day. With these huge developments and coming up all over the city he notices there are few actual venders that are original and independent. The giant super market that is being built is causing all the street venders to run out of business and this upsets Kidlat. Seeing the people losing their jobs to these giant corporations frustrates Kidlat and makes him curse the cities that are being over ruled by the places like the super market. Kidlat taking off in the ship thing is him no longer being happy with what is happening in the world. I think that Kidlat had higher expectations for how things were outside of the Philippines but once he saw how industrialization had some downfalls for locals than he realized that he no longer belonged there. Perfumed Nightmare had many scenes that we could interpret but that ending scene was one that stood out to me an made me wonder why this movie was made and its goal.