Cheryl Dunye is best known for her iconic film “The Watermelon Woman” — a tale of an aspiring Black lesbian filmmaker (played by Dunye herself) who seeks to learn more about the actress behind a mammy figure in 1940s film, credited only as The Watermelon Woman. But “Stranger Inside,” which screened at Brooklyn Academy of Music for this year’s Newfest: Queering the Canon festival, is something patently different but undeniably Dunye.
Treasure (Yolonda Ross) is searching for her mother, a woman she’s only known by means of a photograph. An inmate at a juvenile detention center, Treasure commits an act of violence to be transferred to the maximum security prison where her mother, Brownie (Davenia McFadden), is incarcerated for life. Inside the walls of the facility, Treasure is met with Brownie’s prison family, including “daughter” Kit (Rain Phoenix), and her own found community in old friend Shadow (LaTonya Hagans) and new friend Leisha (Medusa), an aspiring rapper. Meanwhile, Treasure confronts the laws of loyalty, family, and sacrifice in the pursuit of the relationship she’s always sought.
Mixing dramatic narrative filmmaking with her signature “Dunyementary” metafictional style, “Stranger Inside” is Dunye’s investigation of the ties that bind.
I wanted to start by talking about the concept of loyalty as it pertains to family in the film. Treasure functions as a kind of protector in many ways, whether it’s the woman’s belongings in the beginning, the violet, or her willingness to be a frontwoman of Brownie’s drug dealing, she acts on the principle of loyalty. Whereas Kit’s loyalty is about the payoff and the return of belonging to a group. The principle of her loyalty is exclusivity, whether it’s the family or Sugar, and once that’s gone, so is she. Can you talk about crafting these characters in this story and how you investigated the definitions of loyalty and family?
I based it on a slave narrative. For the characters in the narrative, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” they were really experiencing a mother searching for her children and wanting them to be free and wanting herself to be free. Wanting to end the trauma and trying to break the cycle by supplying freedom and wanting people to be committed to it.
On the concept of freedoms, this story of course takes place in a prison, which is this place we associate with stagnance. Kit’s character has mobility on the basis of race, something of course we see in white privilege in the outside world. But within this prison, though she resents being called out for her whiteness in the beginning of the film because it’s this easy, hypervisible wedge to draw between her and the family, it’s then later exactly what she relies on to find another group. Was this something you always wanted to investigate in the film? What were some of those initial thematic lines of pen on paper?
It didn’t come to my mind to investigate that at all. It was a device to break up the sisterhood between Kit and Treasure, to create this rupture in the family. And I just know about some of those truths regarding women in prison — there’s the groups of white women, and latina women, and Black women — it was making a reference to some of those truths of what I was seeing when we visited prisons. I was reproducing what I had seen.
And we’re also seeing the act of involving formerly incarcerated people in their own depictions being given a fresh platform with “Sing Sing,” lately. How did working with actual formerly incarcerated women morph your writing and directing process?
I just tried to be respectful. I couldn’t claim the voice of an experience I do not have. I’m the type of filmmaker who wants to be close to the authentic experience. I put what I could — the relationship of mothers and daughters — in there, but “Sing Sing,” like my film, uses real inmates and incarcerated folks to play themselves. I love documentary and archive, so this was my version of it.
Talking about documentation and archive as legacy, it of course reminds me of “The Watermelon Woman,” where, by means of her films, you’re led to asking the question of “who is Fae Richards, really?” And in this film, Treasure is hunting for this mother figure that she sees only in this faded photograph she keeps with her. And Shadow builds a camera from within the confines of the prison to document those inside. How do these women’s relationships with documentation and legacy mirror what you seek to achieve as a filmmaker?
I love collaborating with artists and involving them in my work. With “The Watermelon Woman” it was Zoe Leonard, who was a friend of mine and was very involved in the creative process of creating those photos. It became an exchange. I love the evidence of photography and what it represents when we hold it, this frozen moment, and it being all that we have of a moment in time. And sometimes we put so much on these photos that they become the truth. Some photos are constructed or not as they seem, but still, we believe them.
There’s actually a photo of my mother in both films, but in [“Stranger Inside”], the one Treasure holds up of two women, one of those women is my mother. I put my own things [in the movies] – it’s just being a filmmaker.
Yeah that’s awesome! I was actually going to ask about those photographs and the set design as well. Knowing that these cells become homes, how did visiting real prisons influence this?
I had done a lot of research and walked through many correctional facilities. Through photographs, this was the way women kept memories and people alive. It’s unfortunate that everything is on a cell phone and now women don’t get to have these photos the same way in present day incarceration. It’s a different time now, you used to have this physical memory and now it’s just the cloud.
In speaking about memory and myth and legend, by the end of the film, the name “Brownie” becomes a legend itself rather than a denotation of a person. I’m curious with the matching Ank tattoos, being a symbol of immortality and eternal life, what role do you think myth and legend plays generationally in Black womanhood and motherhood?
I think you nailed it right there. All of those things connect and for generations Black women have had to have symbols, myth, and storytelling to connect ourselves.
Was the Ank an “aha” moment or was it a symbol you knew you wanted to include?
Definitely more of an “aha.” The art director, hair and makeup, all of us, in the moment it was collective. It was like a choice of tattoos and seeing the Ank and knowing what it means. That’s how it was chosen.
With the hair and makeup as well, I noticed that once Treasure comes into her relationship with Brownie that she goes from having the cornrows to her natural fro. We even see it being rebraided at one point, so we know it’s this choice to rock it natural. For better or worse, Black women’s hair is integral to our perception of ourselves and how others see us. What did those choices look like in crafting her relationship with her hair through the movie?
There’s not too much weight on it. It was really wanting to look at time and showing an aspect of her being changed, and creating looks. Medusa was already rocking a fro and I wanted Treasure to be in between. And also, she was in juvie before, so looking at her as a younger person with braids and then more mature with the fro.
Taking it back to working with formerly incarcerated women, in those group therapy sessions, your filmmaking becomes so much more documentary, even having a fourth wall break in there. Was that a set the camera down and let them go and improvise, or did you guide it?
It was a choice to have that be live with two cameras, the cinematographer and myself. I wanted to commit this to being a moment of having an authentic documentary feel of women telling their stories. We had reached out to a Los Angeles-based formerly incarcerated women’s group and the older white woman in the film was actually a leader of it at that time, so some of the women were chosen by me, some were other formerly incarcerated women, extras, and some were cast, so it was a really nice mix.
In the group of actors as well, I was curious about any greater intention with the role of hip hop. Leisha’s character is a rapper and there’s that very punchy Jay-Z song that kicks off the film.
I love Medusa’s music so I built around her. I listened to a lot of Alan Lomax’s field recordings from Library of Congress from the 1930s and 40s. Music played a large part in the sound of it. I loved Medusa and was a fan of her music and wanted to incorporate that female rapper tone to the film. So that’s where that tone came about. But finding that opening song, it was about what we could afford and what sounded good. The music supervisor came to me with selections, so that was the one we felt had the biggest punch.
Absolutely. With this being your next project after “The Watermelon Woman,” what was the process like to step to being exclusively behind the lens? Did it change how you approached the project on paper and on set?
When I first wrote “Stranger Inside” I thought I was going to play Shadow, and they said I couldn’t, so that was that really. I became comfortable with it. It allowed me to have more control over my directorial impact and what I wanted to do with the story. I grew immensely by having that weight taken off me. Being in front of and behind the camera is challenging. You can’t be everywhere.
You’ve made the distinction before that you were a video arts student and not a filmmaking student. In making this more traditional TV movie, in what ways do you feel you were still able to flex your video arts background?
It was a mixture of many things. I’ve always been a lover of cinema and television — the format, the style, the storytelling. I was able to do a lot of that stuff. As we know, “The Watermelon Woman” was very heavy on my video arts, being much more indie and experimental. But I knew who I was making “Stranger Inside” for. I knew this was broadcast and I needed to move closer to center but still be distinctive, but please my fans too. It was keeping a strong Black lesbian voice as a director and storyteller and then bringing the next audience on. I really wanted to play with the genre of women and prison films both in documentary and narrative. “Stranger Inside” is my attempt to move that genre forward.
