Janicza Bravo
Filmmaker of the Year Janicza Bravo on Zola’s Legacy, Directing TV, and Why She Wants to Write Her Next Film on Her Own
Our 2021 Annual Report wraps up with the announcement of Janicza Bravo as our Filmmaker of the Year. You can find all of our awards, lists, and articles about the best music, film, and TV of 2021 in one place here. A thread that ran through Consequence’s hourlong conversation with filmmaker of the year Janicza Bravo was the concept of what we leave behind in life. This isn’t too surprising, given that both Bravo and this writer were musing about what’s like to be a woman who just turned 40. But what was a bit unexpected was that we got there by way of David Tennant. “The first line of the obituary, I suspect, has been written,” the Scottish actor said a few years ago, commenting on how playing the 10th Doctor of Doctor Who has affected his legacy. When Consequence brought up that quote, it...
Zola Turns a Twitter Thread Into a Thrilling Dark Comedy: Review
This review originally ran as part of our Sundance 2020 coverage and has been updated as of June 2021. The Pitch: “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out????????” began Aziah “Zola” Wells’ epic 2015 Twitter thread, a near-mythic tale of strippers, murder, and kidnappings that went immediately viral. Five years later, here we are, with the first film ever derived from a series of tweets, recounting the story of how Zola (Taylour Paige) falls in with a fellow stripper named Stefani (Riley Keough), who ends up roping her into a road trip to Tampa with her boyfriend Derrek (Succession‘s Cousin Greg himself, Nicholas Braun) and her “roommate” X (Colman Domingo). But it doesn’t take long before Zola figures out the real score: Stefani turns out to be a sex work...
A24 Releases Trailer for Zola, Stripper Film Based on Viral Twitter Thread: Watch
A24 has released the official trailer for their new movie Zola, which premiered at Sundance in early 2020. The film is based on a viral Twitter thread that tells the true story of two strippers who embark on a treacherous road trip across Florida. Directed by Janicza Bravo and starring Riley Keough as Stefani and Taylour Paige as Zola, who fall in love with one another and trek across the state to see how much money they can make as dancers. The two are joined by Stefani’s erratically violent boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and her “roommate” X (Colman Domingo), but shortly into the trip, Zola realizes that Stefani is a sex worker and Derrek is her pimp. The real Zola recounted the wild tale in a famous 2015 Twitter thread that was then adapted into a slightly dramatized R...
