Being BeBe
Director & Writer: Emily Branham
Producer: Emily Branham, Marc Smolowitz, Jonathan Goodman Levitt
Cast: BeBe Zahara Benet (Nea Marshall Kudi Ngwa)
United States, Cameroon, 90 minutes, English, French, pidgin English with Hebrew and English subtitles
Festivals & Awards:
Tribeca Film Festival 2021 – World Premiere
Provincetown International Film Festival 2021 – Winner Audience Award for Best Documentary
Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQIA+ Film Festival 2021
Seattle LGBTQIA+ Film Festival 2021
For 15 years director Emily Branham had followed the story of drag queen BeBe Zahara Benet, the first ever winner of the 24 Emmy awards reality show “RuPaul’s Drag Race”.
As a Cameroonian-American immigrant Marshall Kudi Ngwa had to deal with totally different problems than other LGBT youth. In his country of origin homosexuality is a criminal offense punishable by jail. When he finds himself in the limelight, winning a televised competition, his family doesn’t even know the truth about him. He tries to fulfil his aspirations and create a musical drag act that will express his traditional and cultural world, but is met with discrimination in the American entertainment business.
“Being BeBe” is an unprecedented cinematic profile of an artist navigating inside the complexity of gender, sex and identity politics with one goal in mind – to live creative life against all odds.