Decolonizing the Self: Rebeca Huntt’s Lyrical Journey Towards Abolition, Liberation & Love
Film Still by Sheena Matheiken. Courtesy of NEON
Born out of an intense, ontological curiosity about her existence, first-time feature filmmaker Rebeca Huntt has fashioned an arresting coming-of-age story through call-and-response conversations with her younger self.
“I was going through this existential crisis upon graduating from college—I think every human being goes through some sort of an existential crisis in their early twenties. I exist within this framework of chaos, and it’s constant. How do I navigate this?” asks Huntt.
BEBA digs deep to viscerally explore the ineffable moments and intangible shifts that comprise the foundational makeup of her identity and being. Over the course of her young life, the film offers refined, subtle allusions to how the voices, images, and ideas of myriad artists—from Bob Dylan to Hector Lavoe, Shakespeare to Maya Angelou, Camille Billops to Julie Dash, and countless others—have inspired and influenced her.
Throughout the piece, Huntt investigates the historical, societal, and generational trauma she's inherited. As we witness the contextual references of her life, the filmmaker reflects on her childhood and adolescence in New York City as the daughter of a Dominican father and Venezuelan mother. On the Dominican side, she sees “courage, ambition and abusive rage,” while on the Venezuelan side, she recounts “courage, resilience, and crippling delusion.” Yet in her maternal homeland, she experienced “freedom, unconditional love, and a room of [her] own” for the very first time. To Beba, the ancient wounds that have shaped her existence within these two distinct cultures are fundamental, universal truths that connect us all in the vast depths of our shared humanity.
Free from pretense, Huntt’s voracious intellectual search charts the beginnings of her own creative path. At the same time, the young abolitionist grapples with race critically, emerging with a new decolonial lens of her own Afro-Diasporic origins. Owning her right to be and to be free, she unapologetically walks in the world as a proud Black woman and artist.
The brutal beauty of her portrait cuts straight to the heart and I’m reminded of poet and Black Arts movement builder, sister Sonia Sanchez, who said the reason she writes is because she “wants to tell people how [she] became this woman with razor blades between her teeth.” Brave, stubborn, narcissistic, chronically cruel is how Beba describes herself in the film. Employing the same surgical specificity to describe her grandfather—sugarcane, machete, belt in hand, illiterate, proud—she animates an Afro-Diasporic consciousness in a dialogue through ancestral time.
In a film that eloquently weaves music, 16mm film, archival, and interview footage, a highlight is the prowess of Huntt’s staccato lyricism emanating from the journal entries Beba poured her truth into from a very young age. Precise, carefully crafted use of language, image, sound, creation, and recreations allow us to access the deepest recesses of her private life. She hopes the documentary encourages courageous conversations within ourselves and among one another about the essential things in life. “I feel like it’s an urgent matter that we all connect on a more honest level as human beings,” says Huntt. By remembering, reconstructing, tracing and retracing the contours of her narrative, Huntt anchors us to history, to ourselves, to nature and to what is real.
I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Rebeca Huntt, the breakout Afro-Latinx director of BEBA, on the eve of Juneteenth. Despite the persistent lynching of Black bodies and the entrenched oppressive and systemic racist structures in our society, the date commemorates the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States, now a federal holiday. Recognizing, however, that slavery did not end on Juneteenth, her story calls to mind the lasting impact of 19th century slave narratives. Writers like Frederick Douglass, Juan Francisco Manzano and Phillis Wheatley contributed their accounts in the hopes they would help people comprehend and maybe even empathize with the grave injustice of the dehumanization and subjugation of Black bodies. These first-person accounts, raw and bare, served the abolitionist enterprise.
Photo of Rebeca Huntt. Courtesy of NEON.
Yet, as Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection cautions, “at issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain lines between witness and spectator.” In spite of this, Huntt is determined to tell her story. Analytically distant and setting ego aside, she explores the intersections of the role of art in her life to create her own “space of agency,” a term coined in Black Looks: Race and Representation by the late public intellectual, bell hooks. In doing so, Huntt inserts her vision and authorial voice into a canon of work by artists who have also mined the naked truths of their biographies to add to the unfolding legacy of Black thought, Black excellence, and Black creativity…for liberation.
Declaring that love must be at the center of abolitionist work, in All About Love bell hooks asserts that “decolonization is the necessary groundwork for the development of self love. Love will always bring us back to where we started. It is the deepest revolution.” The culmination of eight years of work forged into an eighty minute documentary, BEBA depicts Huntt’s intimately singular struggle for liberation. Aware of the volatile terrain she traverses and the potential fallout her personal war and revolution may engender, the filmmaker relentlessly interrogates, addresses, and enters her world and the world around her.
Fearlessly exorcizing the voices in her head, Beba defines the terms of our place as spectators and our role as witnesses of her journey.
This is my part.
Nobody else speak.
You are now entering my Universe.
I am the lens.
I am the subject.
I am the authority.
Thank you, Beba, for holding space for all of this.
BEBA, which made a triumphant debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, will be in theaters June 24, 2022 in New York at the IFC Center and in Los Angeles at AMC Sunset.
BEBA is written, directed & produced by Rebeca “Beba” Huntt and produced by Sofia Geld. Editor: Isabel Freeman. Director of Photography: Sophia Stieglitz. Executive Producers: Petra Costa. Alessandra Orofino, Joy Bryant, Inuka Bacote-Capiga, Alyse Ardell Spiegel. Co-Producers: Sheena Matheiken, Monihan Monihan, Isabel Freeman, Nikkia Moulterie, John Hoffman.
Neyda Martinez Sierra is an associate professor and director of the Media Management Graduate Program at The New School and producer of the documentary films LUCKY and Decade of Fire.