'Seeking Mavis Beacon Offers True Crime, AI And Feminism

Whats it like to search for someone who doesnt want to be found?

Filmmaker Jazmin Jones and co-collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross find that answer through their debut Seeking Mavis Beacon, documenting their five-year search for the woman who was the face of the original Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing program: Rene LEsprance.

If youre a child of the late 80s and 90s, odds are you were a pupil of the 1987 gamified typing program created by The Software Toolworks. Mavis Beacon, the Black woman who was the face of the digital software, represented one of the earliest uses of artificial intelligence available to the public and had a significant foundational role in many millennials relationship with digital technology. And to many folks surprise, she isnt real.

But LEsprance is. The Software Toolworks paid LEsprance, a Haitian American woman, just $500 to be the face of a program that went on to sell more than 10 million copies.

Seeking Mavis Beacon attempts to tell LEsprances story while exploring Black peoples relationship with an ever-evolving digital world that makes it so easy to find anyone. Through spirituality, memes, cross-country trips and Jones and Ross own friendship, this film sheds light on something we often forget about as we become more chronically online: our own autonomy.

This film is an offering [to Rene], Jones said during a Zoom interview, citing Zora Neale Hurstons anthropological work . Before you can expect anyone to give you their story or their testimonial, you first give them an offering acknowledging that this is an exchange at best, extractive at worst. Its just taking on that lineage of Zora. This is just the first step of first giving gratitude and saying thanks and I see you. And then the door is always open to continue this conversation or have others.

Jones began working on the film in 2019 before bringing Ross on for her research expertise in 2020. Their views, emotions, struggles and friendship are on full display in the documentary, making their search for LEsprance even more compelling. They are simultaneously storytellers and subjects.

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