Seeking Mavis Beacon
Jazmin Jones’s Seeking Mavis Beacon is less a documentary and more a digital moodboard in motion – frenetic, stylish, self-reflective and chronically online. Co-produced with Olivia McKayla Ross, the film documents the pair’s six-year odyssey to locate Renée L’Espérance, the Haitian-born model behind Mavis Beacon, the fictional typing tutor who became a cult educational icon. The film’s aesthetic is instantly recognisable: browser windows ripple across the screen like gossip at a sleepover, video calls flicker with glitchy intimacy, and email threads unfurl with candid vulnerability. It’s very internet-native – not quite “e-girl”, but certainly drenched in a hyperpersonal, meticulously styled digital femininity with pastel desktops, tabs open to spiritual forums, Craigslist, old blogs, and the speculative memory of the early internet.
Jones and Ross aren’t in a rush to reach the end – and refreshingly, neither is the film. Time is given to the messier side quests: arguments with the failing start-up that loans them their office space; late-night parties with friends who double as collaborators; bouts of self-doubt and joy that play out in real time. These moments do more than fill in the gaps – they reinforce a central truth: the search for a person becomes a search for meaning, community and ownership of narrative.
Mavis Beacon – radiant smile, power blazer, typing hands frozen in mid-action – is the perfect cypher for this. Her software taught millions how to use a keyboard, yet she never existed. The model behind her did, but even she disappeared. In trying to honour L’Espérance’s likeness, the film brushes uncomfortably close to erasing her agency all over again. For all its care and curiosity, Seeking Mavis Beacon can’t quite shake a feeling of intrusion. The dubious ethics of pursuit – especially of someone who clearly doesn’t want to be found – linger.
Nonetheless, Seeking Mavis Beacon is the rare documentary that mirrors the way we actually remember – not neatly, but chaotically, with tangents, people, playlists, and open tabs we never quite close. The mystery of Mavis Beacon remains; but perhaps that’s the point.
Christina Yang
Seeking Mavis Beacon is released nationwide on 9th May 2025.
Watch the trailer for Seeking Mavis Beacon here:
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