Beba

New York filmmaker Rebeca “Beba” Huntt explores her cultural background as an Afro-Latinx woman. Her personal history encompasses a typical melting pot of diverse family stories. Her mother came from a well-to-do background in Venezuela. Her father, of Dominican heritage, worked on a sugar plantation, but had to flee the violence of war and ended up in Brooklyn. In conversation with Huntt, he proudly explains how he managed at last to find a small apartment in Manhattan—the definitive proof of his emancipation.

In the course of four revealing “chapters,” Huntt sheds light on a complicated family history, her upbringing, the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement and her dreams of the future. Clips from home movies, photo albums and other archive material illustrate her youth in multicultural (and latently racist) New York, along with off-the-cuff footage of conversations between the director and her opinionated sister. Huntt remarks on all of this in her voice-over, and muses aloud about all that back and forth between cultures.