Sundance 2024 - Seeking Mavis Beacon

Evan D.

​Long before the Zoomers and iPad kids, a whole generation of children learned to type through the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing educational game. I have fond memories honing my keyboard credentials during a middle school typing class nearly two decades ago under the tutelage of Mavis Beacon. Similar experience could likely be recalled by many millennials across the United States, including Jazmin Jones, the director of Seeking Mavis Beacon.

For as ubiquitous as Mavis Beacon was in the 1990s and early 2000s — some estimates have total sales at over 10 million copies — relatively little is known about the woman who lent her face to the character. Most of Beacon’s students moved on but for Jones, Mavis Beacon and the Haitian model — Renée L’Espérance — who portrayed her were formative parts of her youth. The turn of the century saw precious few representations of Black excellence in popular culture for young people like Jones and her collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross, so they set out to find Renée and tell her story.

Seeking Mavis Beacon tracks the nearly half decade search Jones and Ross embarked upon to find the titular typing tutor. What begins as a true crime style search, slowly fractures into a collection of ideas as the pair inch closer to their subject and farther from understanding her. As they contend with the difficulties of finding a woman who vanished into thin air at the peak of her fame, they also begin to question the journalistic ethics of hunting down a woman who may not wish to be found. Does Mavis really owe any more of herself to the world?

A collection of interesting ideas hold the center of Jones’s directorial debut but rarely do they crystallize into anything truly revealing. She shows promise as a visual storyteller with a unique point of view. The aesthetic of the studio Jones and Ross work out of is lively and their dynamic is the heart of the story. TikTok’s and viral memes populate the corners of various scenes in a way that is both inspired and at times a bit distracting. For all its flourishes, Jones directs and edits a story that is never boring.

On balance, Seeking Mavis Beacon is well conceived but scattered in execution. A sharper version might have more deeply explored the ideas of privacy in the internet age or para-social relationships between stars — even fictional typing tutors — and their fans. That sharper version may just as well have lost some of the unquantifiable energy that Jones and Ross bring to their search as well. In that way the documentary works best as a portrait of two young women searching out a connection to their childhoods. 6/10