Worth: $16.00
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Cast:
Rebeca Huntt, Raquel Huntt, Juancarlos Huntt
Intro:
An intimate, personal story that somehow feels revolutionary …
This feature length debut from New York artist and emerging filmmaker Rebeca Huntt, is an uncompromising self-portrait and daring deep-dive into the histories and hurts of inherited trauma.
A blend of home video, raw 16mm footage and candid interviews, Huntt’s memoir is a whirlwind of chaos, passive aggression and simmering violence. She is both subject and narrator, and she doesn’t pull her punches in her depictions of either herself or her loved ones. Her one-on-one conversations with family members are an attempt to unwind the tangled mess of love, resentment, and anger that grips their Dominican-Venezuelan roots, and their shared experience of growing up poor in New York City.
Huntt’s unflinching style draws the audience in, forcing us to exist alongside her in each unedited moment. The long, weighted pauses before her uncooperative mother agrees to answer her questions are brimming with years of tension, each silence speaking louder than any of her very deliberate answers. It’s an intimate family study that speaks to the broader issues of racism and classism, woven together with Huntt’s own lyrical narration.
Huntt speaks of Bob Dylan, Maya Angelou, and William Shakespeare; writers and lyricists whose influence is present in the way she expresses herself. Her language, poetry, the imagery she chooses to tell her story, all hold an understated power. Her frustration at society’s inherent racism and her white liberal friends’ collective blindness to that racism is palpable — they speak over her trying to find the “correct” words to frame the situation while Huntt herself desperately wills them to understand the need for action. She’s captivating in her brash resilience, an unapologetic personality that translates into every element of her documentary. She spills secrets, despite the fear that doing so will end in her family refusing to speak to her after the film’s release.
The blisteringly unvarnished truths are enough to overcome the college campus slam poetry feel occasionally imbuing Huntt’s voiceover. An intimate, personal story that somehow feels revolutionary, marking Rebeca “Beba” Huntt as a talent worth watching.
