NEW YORK — It’s not easy to put a finger on Janicza Bravo’s cinema.
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.
For even some of Bravo’s closest collaborators, explaining the feeling and style of Bravo’s disorienting, dreamlike movies can be tricky.
Bravo was, in fact, born in New York but raised in Panama before moving to Brooklyn when she was 12.
“This is a moment of profound catching up,” says Harris.
Bravo and Harris approached King’s Twitter thread — a colorfully told, often funny tale that brought phrases like “vibing over our hoeism” into the lexicon — with more reverence.
“When Janicza came on board, it became more about my voice,” says King, who’s an executive producer on the film.
For Harris, it’s a kind of blackface without the makeup; one scene he compares to Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled.” We watch as Stefani drags Zola into a hellish situation.
It’s a theme found throughout Bravo’s work, including her previous feature “Lemon” ; and a series she’s currently developing with Jake Gyllenhaal as Dan Mallory, pen name A.J.
“I wanted to be in conversation with whiteness and I wanted to talk to that because I hadn’t really seen anyone doing that, especially in comedy,” says Bravo.
But “Zola” — still a ride, remember — cloaks its thoughtful mediations.
It’s like I suddenly forget where I am and I’m back in 2015.
Whether because of her identity, international childhood or artistic instincts, Bravo’s knack for making the familiar seem foreign seems perfectly matched for “Zola,” a movie with one foot in real life and another in a strange, ethereal digital reality.
“Why it was being made was because the internet said it had to be,” says Bravo.