Beba is a fascinating new film, a documentary that’s less traditionally explanatory than one more in line with the philosophical video essay films of Chris Marker or the incredibly personal self-portraits Tarnation or Little White Lie. Rebeca Huntt, the filmmaker behind the project, turns the camera onto herself and her family in a soulful exploration so raw it hurts. Niani Scott called it, “the coming-of-age story that Black American children have been waiting for, a documentary that encompasses every step of reclamation of an American bloodline,” and it’s a beautiful, methodical montage of personal experiences.
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Huntt’s film is a cinematic exorcism, a personal reckoning which summons the ghosts of culture, family, and childhood trauma in an evocatively intimate way. Telling the story of her Dominican father, Venezuelan mother, siblings, friends, schooling, and college years, Beba manifests the sentiment that the personal is the political, using Huntt’s life in New York as a microcosm for something universal while retaining its own specificity.
The Unflinching Honesty of Rebeca Huntt in Beba
Neon
“I definitely wanted to be as honest as possible,” Huntt, who was nicknamed Beba by her mother, tells us. “The issues or the questions that I had were very intimate, but also I felt they were questions that most people were asking, but maybe not out loud.” As such, the acclaimed documentary film quietly tackles concepts like assimilation and colonization, generational trauma and what’s passed down through ancestry, and how to form connections in a world of differences.
Huntt interviews her family in extremely personal ways, and while the conversations are poignant and (sometimes uncomfortably) honest, Huntt’s film discovers what lies between the questions and answers. Within each discussion in the film are gestures, glances, and stammers which indicate a lifetime of love, bitterness, frustration, hope, and respect. A documentary interview is always a strange and difficult thing — does ’the truth’ change when a camera films it, like the observer effect in quantum physics? Do people alter themselves once they’re filmed, and how can anything be filmed and edited objectively without bias?
Huntt understands that bias is the lens through which art is so often created, and she doesn’t hold back. The interviews and conversations in Beba, then, take on a fascinating form as Huntt investigates the issues she’s passionate about with the very people she loves. This can be difficult to watch on occasion, this conversation between generations and cultures, and Huntt was understandably concerned. Including anyone you know and love in your art in the pursuit of truth is a dangerous game. Huntt explains:
Huntt’s Family Story in Beba as a Microcosm
While Beba is searingly personal, it’s clear that Huntt’s parents are incredibly proud of their daughter and her film. “They were there at Toronto [the film festival]. They came to every Tribeca screening and every party, and they invited all of our family and their friends, and it continues to be just a feeling of so much pride and love for them,” Huntt says.
My parents are the people who I was the most worried about, because they’re an older generation. It’s like, my siblings, they get that you have to do what you have to do, and they’re also our generation of, like, artists and innovators. Like, we’re very inventive. But my parents, I was a little bit worried about them because they’re baby boomers, and they’re sort of more rigid and hard when it comes to really anything. And I think that it was beautiful to witness how proud of me they were. Of course, there’s going to be pain because it’s shown in the film, and there’s going to be a lot of other feelings, but I know that the overriding feeling continues to be [love].
While Beba is focused on Huntt, her family and friends, and their lives, it also mines these daily experiences for universal treasures. The film can be about Huntt’s relationship with her parents at times, but it can also be about everyone’s relationship with their parents, and Beba becomes “a microcosm for human existence,” Huntt agrees.
Part of this is because the individual human subject is actually not much different from ’the other.’ “I think we’re a lot less unique than we think we are, actually. I think the notion of us feeling like we’re unique, I find it slightly comical. Because, it’s like, we’re not that special.” Acknowledging that kind of universality between each individual makes it easier to connect and empathize with someone else, which is the essence of Beba.
Beba Documents the Pains and Pleasures of Making Connections
Part of the aforementioned pain in Beba, and also why it’s understandable to be very proud of the film, comes about from its honest depiction of connectivity in a very broken world. “I feel like Beba was more about connecting to people,” Huntt says, something which is difficult but important. How do children connect with their parents? How does an immigrant’s experience connect with those from a different culture? How does a person of color find connection in white environments? How do we go beyond labels and identity politics while still holding onto our own difference?
Beba is about all of this, and while it’s a cathartic experience (in both the painful and healing ways), that wasn’t the real motivation. “I don’t think that I set it up [as a form of healing], because I feel like if it was, I would just go to therapy,” Huntt says. “Like, that just came after it as a reality of answering some of the questions that I had about existing. That came naturally, but I really just wanted to connect with people authentically, and to just feel like I could create a life that I was proud of, and a community that I was proud of.”
Beba searches for this connection; even if each individual seems to be in a solipsistic silo of their own experiences, an ideological and cultural feedback loop, Huntt continues the search for connection in the film as a way to break down the barriers.
The Optimism of Rebeca Huntt Informs Beba
There’s an inherent optimism to this pursuit which is spelled out near the end of Beba, when Huntt (who references a variety of artists and thinkers who are important to her throughout the film) quotes the great James Baldwin, who says, “To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.” That master of Black literature redefined pessimism and optimism in much more human terms.
I think this transcends any kind of obsession with categorical notions that we have as a global society. But I think that in any situation, there’s going to be people who don’t understand your experience, but I don’t think that that’s necessarily what makes or breaks community. I think it’s a willingness to understand, and empathy, and care, and love. So, in my mind, I didn’t have those people around me at the time. And I wanted to create and build on that community, on a community that was based on compassion and understanding because I didn’t even have it in my family, to be honest.
“That quote is so important to me in life in general,” Huntt says, “because it’s why I’m not an academic, and why I’m an artist is because I am such an optimist. I’m almost, like, too optimistic. I believe, I really believe in us, I really believe in humanity, and I deeply love human beings. And some of the things that happen in the world sadden men, they sadden me, but then I have to remind myself that human existence is not an academic matter, and that it’s just one moment of sadness. And I have keep going, you know?”
Hopefully Huntt does. From Neon, and produced by Huntt and Sofia Geld, Beba is now in theaters in New York and Los Angeles.
