With Beba, writer-director-narrator Rebecca “Beba” Huntt traces her family lineage to understand who and why she is, from her father’s childhood in the Dominican Republic to her mother’s upbringing in Venezuela to her and her siblings’ youth in a cramped, rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Huntt’s movie wears her family’s historical trauma and current complications like a badge of honor—in keeping with someone who dressed as Harriet Tubman for a grade-school project that also involved a diorama with a Ken doll as a plantation overseer. Huntt has a distinct story and voice, though not always the filmmaking prowess to match. The movie’s imagery—a combination of archival footage, home movies, and confessional contemporary vignettes—could stand to be more pointed and potent; as a whole, the film could be more inventively structured (it begins to feel like journal entries plucked at random). Still, Huntt is a talent to watch. Her psychic wounds now bared, it will be fascinating to see how she explores them, as well as things outside herself, in different cinematic formats.
(12/9/2022)
