Sisters with cameras: Director Yvonne Welbon talks about discovering the advantage lesbian directors have over their straight counterparts, while tracing the history of female African-American filmmakers in Sisters in Cinema.

"One thing I've found is that for women filmmakers, being a lesbian is actually an advantage," Yvonne Welbon declares. And before you say "Say what?" Lake a look at Sisters in Cinema, Welbon's brisk, lively, and incredibly informative documentary about black women filmmakers. The film premieres on the Black STARZ! cable channel on February 8.

"I can't really totally prove it yet because there are so few women out there," adds Welbon, the filmmaker whose credits include the much-praised documentary Living With Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100, "but one of the things that happens to filmmakers is that there's a lot of support on the film festival circuit. The gay and lesbian film festival circuit is the only one where there's a mandate to show gay and lesbian work. So you have somebody like Cheryl Dunye or Rose Troche really get pushed along and supported by a community of men and women through their formative years. Prod obviously a lot of those programmers working the gay and lesbian festivals also work the straight festivals. So what happens is, you trove this built-in advantage that other women just don't have because they're straight."

The lesbian edge is just one of the stories Welbon traces in Sisters in Cinema, which covers everything from recently discovered ultra-obscure ethnographic films by famed Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston to the struggles of talented new filmmakers like Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) and Darnell Martin (I Like It Like That) and breakthrough success stories of Euzhan Palcy (A Dry White Season) and Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou).

As Sisters shows, the challenge often lies in getting a second film made, as many filmmakers who get a start in the independent arena find themselves landing strictly commercial jobs and putting their "real" filmmaking careers on hold. "The women are trying," notes Welbon. "But a lot of times the first feature was such a labor of love. It was done on a shoestring. So many people sacrificed so much to make it happen. That's something you can't really duplicate. So when you move on to yore" next film you want the funding to do it properly. I think what you see is that sometimes they're cosseted, because they go on to do movies of the week and television series and things. But the powers that be are not betting on this in terms of their own work. And today file networks and the movie studios are really the same thing because they're owned by the same companies."

Welbon sees an advantage in cable companies like HBO, for which Cheryl Dunye made the lesbian-themed prison drama Stranger Inside, which Welbon produced. "HBO has this thing where they treated the film as if it were an independent film," she says. "It premiered at Sundance; it played at any number of film festivals. It played around the world. They treated it like a work of art--before they did the television broadcast. I think you'll find that happening in cable in general. There's a lot more support for the independent filmmaker, and they are giving them a lot of opportunities to grow and develop their craft. And that did happen for Cheryl. The Watermelon Woman was under a quarter of a million dollars. Then she did a $2 million movie for HBO. Now she's just done this $15 million Miramax comedy, My Baby's Daddy with Eddie Griffin, Anthony Anderson, and Michael Imperioli. It's kind of a black Three Men and a Baby, but there's a little queer twist to it. The amount of time she did all this is quite unusual."

Welbon has her own full slate of projects to follow Sisters in Cinema. "My next project, which is based on a true story, is set in the early '70s, and it's about a black lesbian Catholic schoolgirl," she says. "It's a mother-daughter story, because the mother was super-supportive of her daughter who got kicked out of this Catholic school for being a lesbian. Her mother decides to fight. And then I have a project I will be producing but not directing--a lesbian musical comedy called Butch Babes on Bikini Beach. I'm developing it right now with a woman named Catherine Crouch, who did Straight On. We don't have a director yet." But what lesbian filmmaker wouldn't want to work with such a savvy producer?

Ehrenstein is the author of Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-2000.