‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’ Filmmaker Jazmin Jones On Documenting Black Identity In The Digital Age
deadline.comIn Seeking Mavis Beacon, filmmakers Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross aim to track down one of the most iconic figures in multicultural education and internet history.
With over 10 million copies sold, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, a 1987 program made by The Software Toolworks, becomes the subject of demystification as the pair aim to analyze the history of the touch-typing program and uncover the true identity of the digital Black woman instructor, Haitian model Renée L’esperance.
Here, Jones talks to Deadline about her experience making the eye-opening documentary and the importance of Black people in the vastly expanding cyber age. DEADLINE: How did you and Olivia McKayla Ross meet? JAZMIN JONES: I started working on a project in 2018, and at that time I was also heavily into collective organizing with my collective BUFU, By Us For Us.
We were holding different spaces and community programming all around this idea of coalition building and solidarity. And on Olivia’s 18th birthday, she came to this alternative school that we were hosting over a summer about cyberfeminism.
Read more on deadline.com