What it’s about
Rebeca Huntt, nicknamed “Beba,” is an Afro-Latina artist in her late twenties, coming to terms with her life. Raised poor on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she shared a cramped one bedroom apartment with her parents and two siblings. We learn it was too close for comfort, creating lasting scars. Eventually the bright, talented Beba earns opportunities, including a full ride to Bard College. Yet the white privilege she encounters there fills her with frustration. When and where will she feel happy and safe?
Why we love it
This fearless, intimate filmed memoir could easily have veered into self-indulgence, but Huntt’s brutal honesty, and her way with a camera, win us over. It’s crucial that she’s willing to expose her own warts along with everybody else’s. Blunt, revealing interviews with her family are interspersed with Beba’s own grainier, more abstract videos, capturing New York City and more exotic places like her mother’s Venezuela. What emerges is a compelling portrait of a vibrant but conflicted young woman struggling through her troubled past to find a future she can embrace.