Seeking Mavis Beacon review – Delightful search for missing icon

Mavis Beacon is considered within the American popular consciousness to be the first influential black woman within the world IT… even though she doesn’t actually exist. She’s a digital Mandela Effect; a virtual image crafted to sell copies of the iconic typic programme, ‘Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing’.

In the documentary, Seeking Mavis Beacon, co-collaborators Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross attempt to find Haitian model Renée L’Espérance, whose photo and likeness was used for the Mavis Beacon character, and give her her much-deserved flowers for inspiring a new generation of black innovators in cyberspace. In the process, they delve into questions concerning their personal relationships to technology, and the ways black identity can be celebrated or exploited within the digital realm.

Through its rough-around-the-edges, DIY style, Seeking Mavis Beacon epitomises what feels like a collective effort to discover the woman who influenced so many lives. The documentary features prescient interviews with a broad range of guests, including authors and creatives, alongside audio-recorded phone-ins and video clips pulled from online, often arranged to form a kind of vibrant, virtual collage. 

With Seeking Mavis Beacon the two co-collaborators question the ways black people are represented in digital spaces, and how they can reflect their own identities through the use of cyberspace. The documentary also interrogates the hidden biases and prejudices against people of colour that influence the creation of AI and other interfaces.

Jones and McKayla Ross’ film is often about the journey, not the destination, but the pace and rhythm of their debut feels uneven at times, particularly as you approach the final third of the film. The themes explored along the way are frequently much more engrossing than the actual hunt for L’Espérance, and their attempts to contact her feel slightly tedious and repetitive, leaving you impatiently tapping your feet. 

At its core, though, Seeking Mavis Beacon is the debut film of two young Black women, carving out their own place for themselves within the historical record. It’s not flawless, or free of blemishes and glitches, but neither should it be. As the film details, it soundly rejects the unjust demands for perfection dealt out to women of colour by society. In turn, they wish to give L’Espérance the space and time to tell her own story, but what if she doesn’t want to be found?

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