In ‘Zola,’ Janicza Bravo’s cinema of ‘life at high volume’ Beállítások

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In ‘Zola,’ Janicza Bravo’s cinema of ‘life at high volume’



“Zola” is very possibly the first feature film adapted from a Twitter thread

NEW YORK -- It’s not easy to put a finger on Janicza Bravo’s cinema. In describing her work, which now encompasses nine shorts and two feature films, including the new film “Zola,” you want to use words like surreal, disturbing, satirical, absurd, otherworldly.

“These are all very good, sexy words to me,” Bravo says, laughing.

“Zola,” which A24 will release in theaters Wednesday, is the most vivid look yet at the 40-year-old Bravo as an emergent filmmaker. The film, which first debuted back at Sundance in January 2020, is one of the most anticipated of the summer. It’s very possibly the first feature film adapted from a Twitter thread — an infamous, mostly true 148-tweet tale from 2015 in which A’Ziah “Zola” King unloaded about a Florida road trip to a strip club that goes harrowingly south.

In Bravo’s hands, the viral tweet storm is a “Wizard of Oz”-like fairy tale that turns nightmare — a hallucinogenic but clear-eyed adventure through sex work, social media, race and violence that’s both fantastical and darkly real. Comedy and horror intertwine. So do movies and the internet.

“I think it very much still is a ride,” says Bravo. “I just don’t know if it’s always a pleasant one.”

For even some of Bravo’s closest collaborators, explaining the feeling and style of Bravo’s disorienting, dreamlike movies can be tricky. Midway through making “Zola,” her production designer, Katie Byron, turned to her and asked if Bravo had done a lot of ketamine.

“I’m unfortunately a little straight edge,” says Bravo. “I’m just very attracted to creating work that feels a little larger than life. It’s just next to it. It’s something kind of familiar but we go to 11.” ทดลองเล่นสล็อตฟรีทุกค่าย

Bravo’s “life at high volume” filmmaking has drawn widespread admirers. Her second short, 2013’s “Gregory Goes Boom,” starred Michael Cera as an embittered paraplegic. Jeremy O. Harris, the “Slave Play” playwright, happened to see it at Sundance and fell in love with it. At the time, he figured Bravo, from her name, was Polish. Bravo was, in fact, born in New York but raised in Panama before moving to Brooklyn when she was 12. Her parents were both tailors, a source of Bravo’s stylishness.

“The thing that I loved about that film then and about all of her films since is that she has this very sly, chaotic way of dealing with the darkest truths of American history while making you laugh throughout it,” Harris said while nursing a hangover and picking up smoothies after a celebratory “Zola” screening in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Harris became friends with Bravo about seven years ago. When the possibility of making “Zola” came up, Bravo asked him to write it with her. For Harris, “Zola” represents more than your average Hollywood breakthrough.