Interview – Jazmin Jones, Director of ’Seeking Mavis Beacon’

2024-09-09

Seeking Mavis Beacon might just be your type. Special guest Jazmin Jones, director and DIY detective behind the new documentary, recently sat down with Jon Negroni for a conversation about online privacy, internet nostalgia, and of course, Letterboxd reviews. In the late 80s and throughout the 1990s, millions of people for the first time learned how to touch type, that is the style of typing on a computer without looking at the keys, through a software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. While it went through numerous iterations...

Seeking Mavis Beacon might just be your type. Special guest Jazmin Jones, director and DIY detective behind the new documentary, recently sat down with Jon Negroni for a conversation about online privacy, internet nostalgia, and of course, Letterboxd reviews.

In the late 80s and throughout the 1990s, millions of people for the first time learned how to touch type, that is the style of typing on a computer without looking at the keys, through a software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. While it went through numerous iterations over the years, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing featured a Black businesswoman in its tutorials. A woman people assumed was a real person named Mavis Beacon but was in fact someone else entirely. In real life, the original Mavis Beacon was Renee L'Esperance, a Haitian model. And she mysteriously vanished decades ago.

In the new documentary distributed by Neon, titled Seeking Mavis Beacon, director Jazmin Jones and her co-collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross set out to uncover what happened to Renee and why. It's a documentary about who owns and controls our public identities and personas, even in the earliest days of the internet. All the way to the present day, when artificial intelligence continues to poke at these polarizing questions in the name of corporate profit.

Seeking Mavis Beacon premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and is now playing in limited theaters. Our intro music is "Time goes by slowly" by Ujan Music Radio.

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