U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance 2020 off to a harrowing start with Janicza Bravo's 'Zola' and Eliza Hittman's 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always.'
In the most startling scene in “Zola,” Janicza Bravo’s gleefully amoral firecracker of a movie, two young strippers conspire to make $8,000 over a single night in a Florida hotel suite. Zola , the brains of the operation, urges Stefani , a prostitute, to up her rates to $500 a pop.
This is the first movie I’ve seen that was inspired not by a book or a play, but by a Twitter thread — a highly addictive narrative composed in 148 tweets by a Detroit-based Hooters waitress and exotic dancer named A’Ziah “Zola” King. Her wild and crazy yarn, about 48 hours she spent on the road with a new friend named Jessica , became a 2015 viral sensation — an eminently retweetable tour de force of humor, suspense and hair-raising violence.
A Panamanian-born filmmaker who was at Sundance in 2017 with her debut feature, “Lemon,” Bravo co-wrote “Zola” with the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, whose divisive “Slave Play” advanced a daring thesis about how black-white relationships retain the psychological vestiges of chattel slavery.
Autumn has retreated into herself for reasons that are unclear at first, but which seem to go beyond the usual teenage moodiness. Boys at school mock her crudely and often; her own family is distant and inattentive. The only person she seems to be close to is her cousin, Skylar , with whom she works as a grocery store cashier. When Autumn suspects and then confirms that she’s pregnant, Skylar is the only person she tells.
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