Mark Reviews Movies: BEBA

Beba, NEON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 23, 2022

Director Rebeca Huntt's Beba is a genuine and self-reflective work of searching. The subject is Huntt herself, who has made a documentary about her own life that is less straightforward biography and more experimental memoir. Coming away from the movie, we get a final sense that the experience of making it was probably more rewarding and clarifying—as well as potentially damaging, by the way, in terms of some personal relationships—for the filmmaker than the experience of watching it is for us.

There's still plenty of worth here, because Huntt reveals herself—her past, her questions and doubts about her life and family, her goals for now and the future—in a way that offers few barriers. The main thrust of narrative involves an attempt to uncover the origins of so the pain and dysfunction she feels within and about herself.

In her 20s and recently graduated from college, Huntt, an up-and-coming artist, finds herself again living with her parents and younger brother in the one-bedroom apartment, near Central Park in New York City, where she was raised. The filmmaker's familial, emotional, and psychological sort-of investigation begins with her father, the son of a field worker at a sugar plantation in Dominica whose family came to the United States when he was a boy. The apartment was a dream of his from his first childhood visit to Central Park. While that meant a family of five sharing a cramped space for a couple decades, the father is stubborn and proud in that way. Huntt sees that in herself, too.

Matters of family are the most intriguing and trickiest elements here. Huntt recalls her father's periods of resentful silence toward her younger brother, the passive-aggressive way her mother—the daughter of Venezuelan immigrants—enacted discipline, the rebellious behavior of an older sister, and Huntt's own possession of all of these traits and more—including her capacity for violence when pushed. Huntt is bluntly honest in these moments of confession or, as her mother—who makes it perfectly clear she doesn't want to talk about any of this on camera—might call them, "snitching."

The rest of the narrative, though, is about her personal experiences in college, learning self-discipline from an attentive professor and hanging out with a group of privileged white friends (who ultimately don't care to understand what it's like for her to be a Black woman in America), and beyond. Lots of narration, home movies, archival footage, and moments of artistic representation on 16mm film give the movie a hazy sense of form, as it is mostly about memories.

Huntt undeniably deserves much credit for the candor and unique approach to storytelling in Beba. There's also little denying that her movie is such a personal work that its attempts to reach beyond the filmmaker's own experiences are hindered by that limited focus.

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