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Have You Seen ‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’?
It’s so much more than a missing-person documentary.
Filmmaker Jazmin Jones and collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross set out to find Renée L’Espérance, the original model for the famous computer program Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
When I put on Seeking Mavis Beacon, I was expecting a traditional missing-person documentary. These types of documentary series and films are a dime a dozen, especially on a platform like Netflix. Because this was produced by Neon, I expected a higher quality, but I was prepared to watch something squarely in that genre.
And I was so wrong. Based on the summary of the film, I had misjudged this, expecting it to be much shallower than it actually is. But there is an incredible amount of depth in this documentary film.
Both Jones and Ross are Black women, as are Renée and the fictional Mavis Beacon. And their identities were really important to this film. It’s wonderful to see how Jones and Ross bring their full selves to this project.
Throughout, we get to see interviews or hear audio from various people about what Mavis Beacon meant to them. As a white person, I remembered using Mavis Beacon, but she wasn’t important to me. But she was incredibly influential to Black people, especially young Black students who saw…