Sffilm has announced the winners of the juried Golden Gate Awards competition and the Audience Awards at the 67th San Francisco International Film Festival (Sffilm Festival). The awards serve as a launching pad for internationally renowned filmmakers who are early in their careers, and they qualify films under 40 minutes for the Oscars. Past Golden Gate Award winners include Panah Panahi, Reid Davenport, Nadav Lapid, Marlon Riggs, Céline Sciamma, Jia Zhang-ke, Stanley Nelson, and Tasha Van Zandt.
This year, the 2024 Sffilm Festival ran five days from April 24 – 28 rather than its usual sprawling two weeks. The Sffilm board opted to pull back conservatively where others would have gone bigger to keep a more expansive footprint. Altogether they brought in 130 filmmakers this year, an excellent global selection of films despite the calendar disadvantage of being caught between Sundance and Cannes.
The big talk at this year’s Sffilm was the news that San...
This year, the 2024 Sffilm Festival ran five days from April 24 – 28 rather than its usual sprawling two weeks. The Sffilm board opted to pull back conservatively where others would have gone bigger to keep a more expansive footprint. Altogether they brought in 130 filmmakers this year, an excellent global selection of films despite the calendar disadvantage of being caught between Sundance and Cannes.
The big talk at this year’s Sffilm was the news that San...
- 4/30/2024
- by Ryan Lattanzio and Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
Seeking Mavis Beacon.From its very first scenes, Seeking Mavis Beacon (2024) invites audiences to interrogate their perceptions of reality. A dreamy hybrid documentary steeped in jewel-toned Tumblr aesthetics, the feature debut from Bay Area–raised artist and filmmaker Jazmin Jones unfolds as an investigation into the curious case of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, an educational software program that rose to popularity just as the internet was beginning to pervade in everyday life. Launched in 1987 by a trio of Silicon Valley developers, Mavis Beacon would go on to coach millions into a more comfortable relationship with technology. Over the years, the game’s early cover-art model, a Haitian expat named Renee L’Esperance, became a familiar face in households across the US and a rare Black icon in the (still) overwhelmingly white world of tech.Despite the ubiquity of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, little was known about its namesake—including the...
- 4/9/2024
- MUBI
Mavis Beacon is the proud, kind, capable Black woman who’s the face of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, the typing program that ushered so many people into the digital age. The way director Jazmin Jones sees it, Mavis Beacon belongs on any list of the most important Black women in modern history, and her reasoning is sound. Indeed, one of the successes of Seeking Mavis Beacon is its emphasis on just how many people would never have found a foothold in the 21st century if not for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. That feels like enough to qualify Mavis Beacon for many an honorific. That is, if the woman were actually real.
Turns out, Mavis Beacon is a mascot character crafted by the three men who developed the typing program. The model for Mavis is a very real Haitian immigrant named Renée L’Espérance, who was paid $500 for her likeness before falling off the grid.
Turns out, Mavis Beacon is a mascot character crafted by the three men who developed the typing program. The model for Mavis is a very real Haitian immigrant named Renée L’Espérance, who was paid $500 for her likeness before falling off the grid.
- 1/30/2024
- by Justin Clark
- Slant Magazine
In her debut feature, Jazmin Jones and collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross are looking for answers. They turn to the divine, the public, and, of course, the Internet for guidance. Their holy grail is Mavis Beacon, the virtual instructor who led one of the most popular learning games of all time. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is a font of nostalgia for those who played it in its heyday, and Black fans like Jones saw Mavis as an especially important pioneer for their digital representation.
Seeking Mavis Beacon is a more artistic and conceptual film than investigative, though Jones and Ross uncover some intriguing context about Renée L’Espérance, the model who first portrayed Beacon. As the game’s first face––and thus the blueprint for Mavis, who was henceforth a Black, female character––L’Espérance played a key role in the birth of the blockbuster game. But what does it mean...
Seeking Mavis Beacon is a more artistic and conceptual film than investigative, though Jones and Ross uncover some intriguing context about Renée L’Espérance, the model who first portrayed Beacon. As the game’s first face––and thus the blueprint for Mavis, who was henceforth a Black, female character––L’Espérance played a key role in the birth of the blockbuster game. But what does it mean...
- 1/30/2024
- by Lena Wilson
- The Film Stage
If you came of age during the height of computer typing programs, the name Mavis Beacon will conjure the image of a pixelated Black woman with a honeyed voice. You might remember her introduction, delivered in a dulcet tone: “Welcome to typing class, I’m your teacher Mavis Beacon.” She was an encouraging presence in the ’80s, reminding you that, with Mavis on your side, you could do anything — especially learn to type.
But who was Mavis Beacon? Is the person who helped acclimate generations to a requirement of the computer age real? In Seeking Mavis Beacon, a frenzied and enlightening documentary, filmmaker Jazmin Jones embarks on a Searching for Sugarman-style quest to find the actual Mavis Beacon. She’s joined by her associate producer and friend, Olivia McKayla Ross, a young woman whose shifting relationship to the internet becomes a key plot point. Together, Jones and Ross dig into web archives,...
But who was Mavis Beacon? Is the person who helped acclimate generations to a requirement of the computer age real? In Seeking Mavis Beacon, a frenzied and enlightening documentary, filmmaker Jazmin Jones embarks on a Searching for Sugarman-style quest to find the actual Mavis Beacon. She’s joined by her associate producer and friend, Olivia McKayla Ross, a young woman whose shifting relationship to the internet becomes a key plot point. Together, Jones and Ross dig into web archives,...
- 1/23/2024
- by Lovia Gyarkye
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Mavis Beacon taught the world to type.
Starting in the late 1980s, a software program featuring the eponymous instructor drilled computer users on their keyboard skills, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide. But it often comes as a shock to find out that Beacon never really existed. A triumph of the advertisers’ art, the typing teacher was an entirely fictional creation. And the image of Beacon that resonates most deeply, the photo of a Black woman in business attire that appears on the packaging, actually belongs to Renee L’Esperance, a Haitian model who was paid a measly $500 for her work and didn’t get to share in any royalties from the game’s success (she’d later sue when her image was altered on subsequent editions).
Decades after the program debuted, Beacon’s outsized influence is being reexamined in “Seeking Mavis Beacon,” a documentary that premiered last weekend at the Sundance Film Festival.
Starting in the late 1980s, a software program featuring the eponymous instructor drilled computer users on their keyboard skills, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide. But it often comes as a shock to find out that Beacon never really existed. A triumph of the advertisers’ art, the typing teacher was an entirely fictional creation. And the image of Beacon that resonates most deeply, the photo of a Black woman in business attire that appears on the packaging, actually belongs to Renee L’Esperance, a Haitian model who was paid a measly $500 for her work and didn’t get to share in any royalties from the game’s success (she’d later sue when her image was altered on subsequent editions).
Decades after the program debuted, Beacon’s outsized influence is being reexamined in “Seeking Mavis Beacon,” a documentary that premiered last weekend at the Sundance Film Festival.
- 1/22/2024
- by Brent Lang
- Variety Film + TV
Jazmin Renée Jones’ “Seeking Mavis Beacon” isn’t your typical kind of quest movie. Premiering in the Next section at Sundance, the format-defying film follows the nonbinary Black filmmaker on an elaborate search to find — but also to better understand — someone who shaped what they thought of the world and themselves. Someone who didn’t really exist: the cover model for popular 1987 computer program “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.”
As past users of the bestselling software surely recall (but may never have consciously considered), Mavis Beacon was a Black woman — knowledgeable and warm, with a striking face and long, elegant fingernails — who encouraged young people to master their keyboard skills. She served as a virtual teacher and confidant for countless kids, including Jones and computer prodigy Olivia McKayla Ross.
An early example of AI, Mavis Beacon was an invention of three white male computer programmers. Why did they choose a Black woman as their avatar?...
As past users of the bestselling software surely recall (but may never have consciously considered), Mavis Beacon was a Black woman — knowledgeable and warm, with a striking face and long, elegant fingernails — who encouraged young people to master their keyboard skills. She served as a virtual teacher and confidant for countless kids, including Jones and computer prodigy Olivia McKayla Ross.
An early example of AI, Mavis Beacon was an invention of three white male computer programmers. Why did they choose a Black woman as their avatar?...
- 1/21/2024
- by Murtada Elfadl
- Variety Film + TV
Exuberantly maximalist in approach, Jazmin Jones’s blast of a debut feature, Seeking Mavis Beacon, is a rapid-fire blend of neo-noir road movie, desktop essay film and meta critique of the “searching for” documentary subgenre. The picture follows Jones and cyber doula friend Olivia McKayla Ross — self-described “e-girl detectives” — on their years-long journey to locate Renee L’Espérance, the Haitian-born model whose face in 1987 adorned the software packaging for the typing instructional program “Mavis Beacon Learns to Type.” As the program sold in the millions, the character of Mavis Beacon, who many believed was a real person, became an […]
The post “Let’s Talk about Glitch Feminism, and What is a Cyber Doula?”: Jazmin Jones on Her Expansive Sundance-Premiering Doc, Seeking Mavis Beacon first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
The post “Let’s Talk about Glitch Feminism, and What is a Cyber Doula?”: Jazmin Jones on Her Expansive Sundance-Premiering Doc, Seeking Mavis Beacon first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
- 1/21/2024
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Exuberantly maximalist in approach, Jazmin Jones’s blast of a debut feature, Seeking Mavis Beacon, is a rapid-fire blend of neo-noir road movie, desktop essay film and meta critique of the “searching for” documentary subgenre. The picture follows Jones and cyber doula friend Olivia McKayla Ross — self-described “e-girl detectives” — on their years-long journey to locate Renee L’Espérance, the Haitian-born model whose face in 1987 adorned the software packaging for the typing instructional program “Mavis Beacon Learns to Type.” As the program sold in the millions, the character of Mavis Beacon, who many believed was a real person, became an […]
The post “Let’s Talk about Glitch Feminism, and What is a Cyber Doula?”: Jazmin Jones on Her Expansive Sundance-Premiering Doc, Seeking Mavis Beacon first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
The post “Let’s Talk about Glitch Feminism, and What is a Cyber Doula?”: Jazmin Jones on Her Expansive Sundance-Premiering Doc, Seeking Mavis Beacon first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
- 1/21/2024
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
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