It’s rare to see a comedy immediately get going in its first shot as Between the Temples does—no credits, throat-clearing establishing shots or slow unveiling of protagonists, instead a slow zoom out introducing cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) being cornered at the dinner table by his moms Meira (Caroline Aaron) and Judith (Dolly De Leon). The two mothers lovingly hector him (this movie operates at dizzying levels of Jewishness), saying it’s time to seek out a doctor for his problem: following the death of his alcoholic novelist wife, Ben is a cantor who can’t sing. This gives Temples a surprisingly normal […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 20, 2024Exuberantly 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 […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2024Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? Given the investigative nature of Seeking Mavis Beacon, I knew I wanted to play with elements of noir and true crime. It’s worth mentioning that I have a contentious relationship with these film genres but, aesthetically speaking, they’re rife with visual motifs that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2024NEON announced today that they will produce the documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon by director Jazmin Jones, one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2021. The eponymous Beacon, initially personified by a Haitian woman, Renée L’Espérance, was the face of the popular Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software game. L’Espérance subsequently vanished, and the film, according to the press release, “will investigate the disappearance and reimagine the legacy of a missing Black woman who helped define the digital age.” Comments Jones, “NEON has been a perfect home for this project. They understood our positionality as Black femmes and share our interest in disrupting traditional documentary […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2022