Neon has debuted the first trailer for Beba, the vibrant-looking directorial debut of Rebeca Huntt. Described as a “remarkable coming-of-age documentary/cinematic memoir,” Beba premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be released in New York and Los Angeles theaters next month.
This isn’t a long trailer; it comes in at less than two minutes. But in those two minutes, it announces Huntt as a filmmaker with a singular perspective on growing up as a person of color “amid a landscape of intense racial and political unrest.” There’s a unique visual style on display here, and a very ‘90s-inspired aesthetic. Not in terms of the period setting, but mainly because some shots in the trailer look like they could belong in, say, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
Bright, bold letters declare Beba to be “an eight-year journey, an illuminating self-portrait, and visionary act of love.” This is followed by a bunch of positive blurbs about the movie. We see Huntt wrestle with her identity as the daughter of a Dominican father and a Venezuelan mother, but also as a “first generation” American. Weaving together “music, 16mm film, poetry, and interview footage,” the best way to describe the trailer is this: it’s Radha Blank’s The 40-Year-Old Version meets Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican.
Describing the experience of interviewing her parents for the film as “beautiful and frustrating,” Huntt said:
“It was very difficult at the time to interview my mother because we could just not talk to each other about anything. My father, it was kind of beautiful to interview him. I’d never seen my father in a situation where he had a camera in his face, and he was a natural. I love hearing him speak, and I love hearing his stories. But it was also difficult because there were things that I wanted to ask him about that I didn’t feel comfortable with but knew I had to. It was beautiful and frustrating.”
Huntt is an Afro-Latina writer-director born and raised in New York City. She premiered her first short film, 1-800 Lovable, at the 2020 BlackStar Film Festival, and was recently included in DOC NYC’s “40 under 40” list. She was also a participant in The Gotham Documentary Lab.
Beba will be given a limited release in New York and L.A. on June 24. You can watch the trailer down below.
Here’s the synopsis for Beba:
First-time feature filmmaker Rebeca “Beba” Huntt undertakes an unflinching exploration of her own identity in the remarkable coming-of-age documentary/cinematic memoir BEBA. Reflecting on her childhood and adolescence in New York City as the daughter of a Dominican father and Venezuelan mother, Huntt investigates the historical, societal, and generational trauma she’s inherited and ponders how those ancient wounds have shaped her, while simultaneously considering the universal truths that connect us all as humans. Throughout BEBA, Huntt searches for a way to forge her own creative path amid a landscape of intense racial and political unrest. Poetic, powerful and profound, BEBA is a courageous, deeply human self-portrait of an Afro-Latina artist hungry for knowledge and yearning for connection.
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