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30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025

Cheryl Dunye on her CineMart project Black Is Blue: “the power of film to be a tool for reflection”

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Rotterdam favourite Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman, IFFR 1997) talks to us about returning to the festival for a Big Talk at IFFR 2025 together with Argentinian filmmaker Albertina Carri (¡Caigan las rosas blancas!, IFFR 2025 Big Screen Competition), and to present her dynamic new project Black Is Blue at CineMart, which she describes as a sci-fi trans erotic thriller.

Set in the near future within the dystopian tech boomtown of Oakland, California, Cheryl Dunye’s CineMart project Black Is Blue strikes a cautionary (and very timely) note as it tells the erotic tale of a black trans couple brought together by AI technology.

In the film, Blue is a 40-something black trans woman who was once a successful tech executive at SentiTech Robotic, a multinational that gained control of the world’s largest DNA database used to find a cure for all genetic diseases. Black is a doomed 30-something POC transman trying to land a job as an AI programmer, all the time dreaming of a better life. Lison, meanwhile, is an elegant genderless AI “friend-bot” whose status is elevated within the narrative as they bear witness to the sensuous tale of Blue and Black as it unfolds in front of them.

“I see less and less of queer and trans and people of colour involved in that conversation”

The new feature is an elaboration on a 20-minute film Dunye made in 2014 of the same name. Back then, she had just moved to the Bay Area of California and was beginning to see the panoply of new gender identities that were emerging, and therefore felt at home. Nevertheless, she could also observe an emerging gender disparity in the field of tech and within the workplace. 

Cheryl Dunye

“Unfortunately, when I started to look at queer folks who are trans and of colour and who really look like me – masculine-presenting etc – they weren’t having the same agency as the sort of white, queer, trans masculine-presenting folk.”

AI was a growing (“bubbling”) industry back then, and now it is a fully-fledged one, she further points out. “[And] I see less and less of queer and trans and people of colour involved in that conversation, involved in our futures, involved in what the future could look like with us in there. It’s a clear obliteration of it. And as we move into this new democracy – if we want to call it democracy – I’m sure we’re going to see, for the next four years…more and more using our lives as a way to just control folks like me and many of the folks involved in the project.”

Hence Dunye’s urgency in making this new feature. 

“I think this is a film that, for me, goes back to my roots of filmmaking,” she says. “For the last seven years, I’ve been an episodic television director making other people’s work, but not my own. Prior to that, I had made a film Mommy is Coming (2012) with Jürgen Brüning, who is one of the producers on this project. The Owls (2010) I did independently.” 

“The power of film to be a tool for reflection…on the margins or the inside or the outside of what’s going on in society”

“Then we get into other projects all the way back to The Watermelon Woman (IFFR 1997),” Dunye adds of her feature debut which explored the history of black women and lesbians in film. “Most of those projects have lived a life as part of cinema in the world globally. It always feels good to be part of the global conversation and representing my oeuvre within the context of the world and [its] issues, and the power of film to be a tool for reflection…on the margins or the inside or the outside of what’s going on in society.”

Film still: The Watermelon Woman

“So I’m really excited to be able to step outside of this episodic world and go back to where I started and work with a family and with a way of filmmaking that is at my heart,” Dunye underlines.

The director cites Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) as a reference for potential investors at CineMart. “Like our film, [it] also examines the humanity of humanoid creations. Suppose Ex Machina is a film that challenges how male and female identities are constructed by a cismale-dominated society as much as by biology. In that case, visually and thematically, Black Is Blue similarly challenges how artificial intelligence characters in films have historically left out trans humanoids and/or humanoids of colour.”

“I think this is the right market to find those people who want to make that happen”

Dunye’s cinematic approach to her new film is equally intriguing. “Black Is Blue takes the cadence of a speculative thriller—a touch of Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, a swish of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ – and melds it with the architecture of tech advances in the development of AI companions. All of this is held together by the emotional urgency of trans romance, the kind between characters we’ve never seen at the helm of a feature film.”

“I want to give my audiences, my Hollywood folks, my followers and anybody who wants to watch the film, a great cinematic experience…and I think this is the right market to find those people who want to make that happen,” Dunye adds of her attendance at IFFR Pro, where she will also engage in a Big Talk conversation with equally legendary filmmaker Albertina Carri to reflect on their experiences creating spaces for underrepresented voices on the big screen with boldness and sensitivity.

“Marten and I go way back”

Dunye is also looking forward to hooking up again with new IFFR Pro Head Marten Rabarts, with whom she collaborated when he was Artistic Director of the ground-breaking Binger Filmlab. “Marten and I go way back – that was around the early 2000s, so I’ve known him for quite some time. We both have shape-shifted, but I’m so glad to see Marten in his inaugural year at IFFR Pro.”

Big Talk: Cheryl Dunye & Albertina Carri

Tuesday 4 February, 20.00

Argentinian director Albertina Carri returns to Rotterdam to present her latest film (¡Caigan las rosas blancas!, IFFR 2025) as part of the Big Screen competition, after her Hubert Bals Fund-supported first feature No quiero volver a casa was screened in 2001. Renowned for their daring explorations of unconventional narratives and complex identities at the intersections of personal and collective memory, two legendary filmmakers will reflect on their experiences creating spaces for underrepresented voices on the big screen with boldness and sensitivity.

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