Black Cinema Series: Zola

The Black Cinema Series is graciously curated by guest programmer Anpa’o Locke.

“Because humankind will never stop inventing new forms for old stories, it was only a matter of time before we got a movie adapted from a Twitter thread. In Zola, directed and co-written by Janicza Bravo, a young waitstaffer at a Hooters-style restaurant makes a new friend who cajoles her into taking a weekend road trip to Florida. The goal is to make some quick money dancing at strip clubs, which seems forthright enough. But the ensuing adventure involves guns, sex work, a menacing pimp and a lovelorn boyfriend’s suicide attempt. And all of it really happened—or sort of happened—as recorded by a young woman named A’Ziah “Zola” King in a series of 148 tweets posted in October 2015. Each installment was a nail-biter rendered in 140 characters or less. Unsurprisingly, this prose poem of stripper life went viral.

With Zola, Bravo captures the brashness of King’s voice and turns it into a movie that works against all odds, a black comedy and crime drama that begins as a strippers’ lark and evolves into a NSFW saga of violence and sex trafficking. But Zola is also a story about platonic attraction between women. Sometimes we befriend women who are all wrong for us. We’re as susceptible to feminine magnetism as men are, even if the game doesn’t end in bed.” -TIME Magazine

Runtime: 87 min

Anpa’o Locke is an Afro-Indigenous writer, filmmaker, and curator who is Húŋkpapȟa Lakota and Ahtna Dené (Village of Tazlina), born in the Standing Rock Nation and now residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.She was a 2023 Native Lab Fellow and a 2022 Full Circle Fellow at the Sundance Institute, where she developed her upcoming short film Kawá, which follows an Afro-Indigenous teen reconnecting with her Native roots. Anpa’o’s work is dedicated to amplifying Indigenous narratives in cinema. In 2023, she co-curated Imagining Indigenous Cinema at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. This groundbreaking series highlighted over 40 films by US-based Indigenous artists in the post-Standing Rock era. She has also worked as a writer for PBS Digital Studios’ Sovereign Innovations and as an Associate Producer for Best Case Studios.

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