The Creators of Seeking Mavis Beacon on Using AI, Authenticity, and Femme Documentarians

Words: Rogan Graham

Director Jazmin Jones and super sleuth collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross are just two Black femmes asking questions. Their debut feature, Seeking Mavis Beacon (2024), is a genre-defying exploration of the enigmatic figure behind the 1987 software program, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. In an era where documentary filmmaking is rapidly evolving — blurring the lines between personal narrative, archival excavation, and internet ephemera — Jazmin and Olivia are carving out a space that feels both radically intimate and intellectually sharp.

We speak on Zoom over a year after the film’s Sundance Premiere in 2024, with Jazmin (a Gemini) joining the call at 5am Pacific time, wearing enviable FESPACO merch and Olivia (a Virgo) fresh back from a cryptography residency in Taiwan.

In our interview, the duo speaks candidly about the surreal and rewarding experience of watching their work enter the internet’s cultural bloodstream. The conversation spans everything from their connection to Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) — a film they consider a creative origin point — to their reflections on the ethics of representation, creative lineage, and the politics of AI.

Far from a straightforward investigative documentary, Seeking Mavis Beacon is a speculative meditation on labor, identity, and legacy, weaving familiar desktop aesthetics with vérité footage, internet folklore, and deeply personal storytelling. Jazmin and Olivia reflect on the creative decisions that shaped the project — including their conscious choice to place themselves in the narrative. Seeking Mavis Beacon is not a true crime flick but an offering to young Black internet nerds; it’s about making space for ambiguity, vulnerability, and the kinds of stories that rarely make it to the centre of the screen.

How are you enjoying the reception to the film so far?

Olivia McKayla Ross: It’s been fun, my social media algorithm is attuned to the type of people who would organically see the film. It’s interesting to like watch the internet slowly digest it

Jazmin Jones: Something I've been saying throughout the entire tour is until the film returns to its natural habitat on the internet, the cycle won't feel complete. It's been nice to see the online discourse surrounding the project, but then that got really meta and weird, and I had to stop looking into it too. The film has been such a platform for my personal growth, it feels like we've aged in dog years in the seven or eight years since we've started the project until now. 

I’d love to hear about your relationship to Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman

Jazmin: It's our meta text, it's our genesis! When people ask “Oh, when did you come up with this idea?” It was in 2018 and seeing the very limited search results [for Mavis Beacon] instantly I was like, “Oh, my God, this is like the real life Watermelon Woman!” That's part of the reason I wanted to open the film with the quote from Cheryl Dunye, picking up with the tools that Cheryl Dunye left us. It's been a really helpful text, not only in terms of the format and this idea of critical fabulation and imagining our own historical figures, but also, I think it's been great to have a Black queer filmmaker whose career to look at as well. And so for me just looking into the lore of the Watermelon Woman and how they created their own archives, and how she got this grant and then got in trouble because of the nudity. All these choices that at the time were really controversial like “Why would you insert your naked body in this film?”

“And now, you know, several decades since the film's release, the baby queers are like, we totally get this! “

There's an interesting wave in recent years of women and femme documentarians situating themselves in the narrative

Jazmin: I think that's very generous, because there's nothing more masculine than being like, “You know what? This film should be about me.” There's nothing more like a straight, cis, masculine White guy than being like, “I deserve to be right here.” But also, like, why wouldn't we be in it? The film exists in that energy of being in a parking lot with your friends. We're living in these crazy, vibrant subcultures, it's kind of fascinating to me that the film industry isn't capitalising more on that. But I also do think that's part of a tradition that has been set by the greats, like Agnes Varda. Outside of that tender, queer, femme lens I think we're doing the same kind of thing as Nathan Fielder, too, where it's ethically complicated half the time, very unserious, but taking something to the furthest conclusion. 

Olivia: I feel like I want to push back against the white male tradition. There's this myth of the dude genius who had the idea by himself, and no one ever told him anything, and he was just born with a brain that was full of diamonds. I think when you are honest about the lineage of work and creativity that contributed to who you are and contributed to how you see the world and you cite that, it ends up being almost like a scrapbook, which is easy to feel self conscious about because our model for talent and taste is this guy who's able to pull rabbits out of a hat. I think being referential is actually being honest. But regarding putting ourselves in the film, that was something that we talked about early on. We knew that we wanted to make a film about Mavis Beacon, but we didn't want to go up to the model who plays Mavis Beacon and say, “Please be the focus point of our film. If you don't participate, we don't have a movie. And we'll be super sad and you'll destroy our dreams.” We wanted to create an environment where we could get a real, true, enthusiastic Yes, or a real, stable No.

A theme you touch on in the documentary is the tension between a Black Femme avatar being a servile fembot or even mammy figure, versus the nurturing you got from Mavis Beacon and the implications of AI more broadly

Olivia: It's really easy to create a world for oneself in this current information age where you don't have to raw dog critical thinking at all, and we feel like while you're trapped in a theatre with us, you’re in a space where, we're only going to ask questions and then you're going to have your own. And you must. Jazz has often referred to Mavis as their first black teacher and that is a very beautiful memory that so many different people share. And then also this programme uses her body's labour to perform this very specific, encoded relationship of docile femininity, an intelligence that won't surpass yours because it's in the body of a Black woman. As Stephanie Dinkins says in the film, I feel like working on the project and the conversations since have really turned me into a robot rights activist. Slavery really fucked our economy and even though robots aren't real people, in an economy where work is not valued, where labour is just created and is not compensated, it devalues the labour of everyone else inside of that system.

‘Well, why would I pay this human if I can have AI do that for me?’ Less than 400 years ago, ‘Why would I have a person do this when I could have a slave do it for me?’ We keep creating this vacuum of undervaluing work and not compensating work, and so on that level, I don't care if Mavis is a robot, pay her. And the way that you pay her is that you put that money back into the economy some other way, the labour that you got for free, and this goes for all kinds of artificial intelligence, the labour that you got for free by burning down the Amazon rainforest, you must put that back, and the ledger has to be completely equal.

The documentary borrows from a lot of genres, in post-production how did you approach joining all your influences and segments together?

Jazmin: I used to binge watch True Crime stuff, now I know how a film gets made and edited, and how ethically complicated it is, I can't watch it. When we announced the project we had like 10 True Crime podcasts reach out to us, so we had to make sure that whatever is coming through in the brief now, isn't how we make the film feel.

We still had like a year and a half of production and we started working with our lead editor, Jon fine, and he made an assembly cut that was really useful, because I was like,

I was very strict when it came to the last thing that we integrated being the desktops, because I didn't want those to become too much of a gimmick. I wanted to make sure that the film worked on its own, and then that was the connective tissue for the ideas and the glossary that we wanted to impart on audiences. I was really big on the desktops being something that I edited on my own with materials from Olivia and my bookmarks, just because it is so specific to us and our algorithms. I wanted to make sure that it felt like you were actually a hacker or spirit going through our computer and watching us go on this journey.