Before Cheryl Dunye became a defining voice of the New Queer Wave, she was already using film to claim space for a life rarely seen on screen. Janine is one of her earliest works: a raw, intimate experiment that blends autobiography, performance and confession to give form to a young Black lesbian’s experience of desire, isolation and self-recognition.

By turns funny, painful and quietly defiant, the film already carries the urgency that would define Dunye’s later work. It insists that Black lesbian lives, loves and stories matter — and that cinema can be a space in which to see oneself, not as an exception, but as fully present.