Jumai Yusuf’s function debut Cocoa Doll is being launched to worldwide consumers on the Toronto Movie Pageant this week.
Co-producers and gross sales brokers The Dazey Part and Unger Media are buying the horror pic about, Nora, a younger Black girl who takes a caregiving job for the McNeils, a wealthy white household, solely to find they’re hiding a lethal secret.
Cocoa Doll was beforehand chosen for the Black Listing’s Muslim Listing. Yusuf wrote and directed the indie, which was impressed by caricatures of Black individuals from the Jim Crow period not misplaced to historical past.
“Once I got down to write a horror movie, I knew I needed to faucet into the issues that actually hang-out me. Cocoa Doll is my manner of reminding people who Jim Crow isn’t some distant previous. It’s a horrifyingly latest chapter of American historical past,” Yusuf mentioned in an announcement.
Her brief movie Nate & John premiered at Tribeca and gained the Gold Home Cultural Influence Award on the American Pavilion Rising Filmmaker Showcase in the course of the Cannes Movie Pageant. Yusuf additionally directed The Eid Present for Rifelion’s Ramadan America anthology that bowed at SXSW.
“Once we first learn Jumai’s extraordinary script, we had been blown away by the a number of layers of the story and the way it flips all the pieces you assume about our nation on its head. We now have little question viewers will probably be cheering Nora on as she realizes there’s extra to the McNeils than meets the attention,” Unger Media CEO Jonathan Unger mentioned in an announcement.
Current collection from Unger Media embrace the podcast Shattering The System, hosted by NPR journalist Sonari Glinton, and the indie movie Mysterious Methods, directed by Paul Oremland.
The Dazey Part slate contains the Sundance 2024 NEXT winner Want Strains, the horror comedy Blue Balls and a guide adaptation of Written within the Stars.