God, cinema! Remember that? Like, paying money for a ticket and sitting in a dark air-conditioned room with strangers for two hours watching a film while simultaneously trying to recover precious pieces of popcorn that have escaped your grasp? Personally, it’s been so long that I do not, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look forward to the films that are coming our way in future.
Top of our watch lists? A24’s hyped new film Zola, a stripper-slash-sex-worker road movie that was inspired by a thread of tweets posted by the film’s titular character, chronicling a whirlwind friendship that ended in disaster. And after getting strong reviews out of Sundance Film Festival, our first look at the film is finally here.
Just a short 40-second clip, in it we see Zola, played by Taylour Paige, and Stefani, played by Riley Keough, apply makeup in a mirror. “You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch here fell out?” Zola says in a voiceover. “It’s kinda long, but it’s full of suspense.”
The original story was chronicled on Twitter back in 2015, and told the story of Zola, a stripper, and Stefani, a sex worker, joining forces to cross Florida and rack up as much cash working in strip clubs as possible. But as you can imagine, as a whole film has been born from that experience, things don’t exactly go to plan. The script was written by filmmaker Janicza Bravo, with the assistance of Jeremy O. Harris, the i-D contributor and writer of Slave Play.
The trailer ends with a series of versions of the phrase ‘Coming soon’, partly because — yep, you guessed it — we have absolutely no idea when this film is coming and A24 doesn’t either.