By her own admission, violence lives in the DNA of documentarian Rebeca Huntt aka Beba. Bloodshed would be an easy way out — god knows there’s violence enough in her life to go around. But going to war would only result in casualties, a stamp of disgrace that cannot be her legacy. Beba opts for a keener course of action: put down the sword and pick up a camera. She jokes that her parents, a Dominican father and Venezuelan mother, worked hard to maintain their status as the poorest family on Central Park West. An acrimonious confrontation between mother and daughter percolates truth past the boiling point. By turning her anger into art, Beba’s search for identity bounds past conventional coming of age docs and the surge in video confessionals made popular with the rise of phone cameras, and into the province of poetry. The photography and editing live in harmony to capture and present a single-minded portrait of the pain and uncertainty that goes into surviving one’s early-20’s. Huntt combines the best that narrative, documentary, and experimental cinema has to offer to produce an unflinching journey toward selfhood. (2021) — Scott Marks