Private Project

Zora’s Interlude: The Making of [b]REACH adventures in heterotopia

Inspired by the anthropological practices of Zora Neale Hurston, whose participatory research and ethnographic field work document the inner life of Black folk, Zora’s Interlude: The Making of [b]REACH is a 60-minute film co-directed by kai lumumba barrow and jazz franklin.

A compilation of colorful vignettes that mix animations, super 8mm film footage, interviews, and a cinéma vérité style. The story arc follows kai and jazz, an intergenerational duo collectively known as “Gallery of the Streets,” as they document the making of their Black abolitionist public art project, [b]REACH: adventures in heterotopia.

As they clarify their ideas, experiment with form, and research, resource and explain their vision, the Queer/Black/Feminist/Abolitionist/Artist/Autonomous/Activists, come up against numerous obstacles, not the least of which includes the nagging question: What is abolitionist art? An absurd look at an encroaching carceral landscape, disaster capitalism, the global tourism industry, and the disappearance or re-invention of significant sites of Black radicalism, the documentary also explores the characters attempts to name, demonstrate, and imagine abolition art. The documentary explores the contemporary moment—what some argue as a “world in crisis,” while also showing resistance to these dire conditions in less visible settings, such as the interior spaces of social movement organizations and the everyday life of community survival—often the most salient and powerful models of resistance and alternative-building.

  • kai barrow
    Director
  • jazz franklin
    Director
  • kai barrow
    Writer
  • jazz franklin
    Writer
  • Damia Khanboubi
    Producer
  • kai barrow
    Key Cast
  • jazz franklin
    Key Cast
  • Gallery of the Streets Crew
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Runtime:
    10 minutes 2 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    April 17, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    318,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital, Super 8mm, 16mm
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - kai barrow, jazz franklin

jazz franklin/co-director
jazz's filmmaking praxis plays with power and possibility. For the past 10
years she has been an activist and grassroots organizer working to shift
power with organizations like Southerners on New Ground, Black Youth
Project 100, and The Southern Movement Assembly. Her video and
documentary work are an extension of her organizing. jazz is also part of a global network of artists, activists, and organizers called Gallery of the
Streets who work together to “transform public and private spaces into
temporary sites of resistance...into phantastical subversive imaginaries.”
Since 2016, jazz collectively works to organize programming for the
PATOIS The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival and its
year round events. In 2019, she was a part of the New Orleans Film
Society's Emerging Voices cohort and she was nominated for a regional
Emmy for her editing work on the documentary Preserving Justice.

kai barrow/co-director
Barrow is interested in the praxis of radical imagination. Together with her
muses: Absurdity, Sarcasm, Myth and Merriment, she experiments with
abolition as an artistic vernacular. Her sprawling paintings, environmental
installations, and sculptures are sited in traditional and non-traditional
spaces to transgress ideological, geographic, and carceral borders. Using
materials associated with Black women’s labor, the work performs queer,
Black feminist theory as an aesthetic genre.
Barrow is a member of the Antenna Collective in New Orleans, and a
founding member of Gallery of the Streets, a national network of artists,
activists, and scholars who work at the nexus of art, political education,
social change and community engagement. She was recently awarded an
“Artists of Public Memory Commission” from Prospect New Orleans and
has received residencies, fellowships, and awards from Project Row
Houses; the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center; the Joan Mitchell
Center; A Studio in the Woods; Alternate Roots; the Kindle Project, and the
Weavers Project Fellowship.
A social-movement organizer for over forty years, barrow has worked with
numerous grassroots organizations including SLAM!, FIERCE!, Critical
Resistance, UBUNTU, and Southerners on New Ground.

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