Zola Studios is Building a Creative Community for Regions With Underrepresented Storytellers

Khalifa, born to Sudanese parents in Saudi Arabia and raised in Ireland and Scotland, is a director, filmmaker and writer. After working as a stylist at some of the world’s biggest magazines for over ten years, she turned to filmmaking. Her debut documentary Inside the Real Saudi Arabia aired on BBC1 in 2018, paving the way for a career in film that eventually led her to starting her own business.

“In the U.K., you have to become a business if you earn a certain amount of money,” she explains. “I always loved the idea of being a business owner and wanted to bring the community in. I think that the most successful people make something that eventually lives beyond them.” Khalifa sat with the idea for two years and when Mooro came into her life, asking her to shoot a documentary in Egypt, her gut instinct told her that this was the business partner she needed.

Mooro is an Egyptian-born, London-raised writer, producer and author of the bestselling nonfiction book The Greater Freedom: Life as a Middle Eastern Woman Outside the Stereotypes. She is the founder of The Greater Conversation newsletter and community which, “honestly explores and addresses all aspects of life through the eyes of a Middle Eastern, third-culture, woman, human in search of her most authentic voice."

Zola is the Sudanese Arabic word for a female person. Khalifa feels it highlights her vision for the company to be about people, encapsulating the warmth of a community. “In the same way you’d say, ‘Hey girl’, ‘Hey you’, ‘Hey there’, you would say 'Ya zola' in a warm way to call someone.” When Mooro came onboard, further research found that the word is also a derivative of “sultan,” reflecting strength, authority and rulership.

How did Mooro come onboard? “I have a favorite opening that I tell everyone,” Mooro says with a laugh, sharing how she had been trying to connect with Khalifa who she says, “didn’t have the capacity to make new friends and refused to meet [her].”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mooro spent six months in Egypt and came across a podcast about two Egyptian sisters that started the first modeling agency in Egypt. “I thought Basma should direct a documentary about it. Me and Basma are going to do this together,” she says. “I came back to London and our friend finally managed to bring us together.” “I had space now,” Khalifa interjects, laughing. “I said yes, even though I’d never directed or shot a documentary and neither had Alya [Mooro].”

Mooro set up a Zoom call with the Egyptian sisters — but they said no to the idea. They didn’t feel ready yet. “Here is where our different personalities come in,” says Khalifa. “Alya [Mooro] kept wanting to follow up with them, but I told her to just wait and see. I knew that you can’t make a documentary with someone who doesn’t want to make it. You can’t persuade them. ”

Eventually [according to Khalifa, six months, and to Mooro, two months later], the sisters reached out again and agreed to shoot the documentary which Khalifa and Mooro traveled to Cairo for. “We really bonded on this trip, because we gave each other bravery to believe in our own abilities,” says Mooro.

The synergy the two friends and business partners found with each other clearly resonates throughout our conversation. They make space for each other to speak, then interject and playfully dispute each other’s narratives, all the while sharing compliments and genuine appreciation for the other.

“Alya [Mooro] is all about self-actualization and self-growth, she is great with words and has a great mind,” says Khalifa. “I’m more on the business side. We’re different and don't have a lot of crossover business wise because there are elements we both look after very well,” she adds.

Since their first trip to Cairo, they have worked on multiple projects and built a far-reaching, long-term vision for Zola Studios. “When you’re aligned, it opens doors,” says Mooro. “The amount of opportunities that have come our way, Alhamdulilah. I’ve learned so much from working with Basma [Khalifa]. She really helped me to advocate for myself. Even just being in her presence makes me feel like I’ll also have my own back. When I have a little freakout, she reminds me to take a second and just breathe.”

In turn, Khalifa learned from Mooro to be a more disciplined dreamer. Together, they have built a ten year plan that has many arms. Starting with the release of the documentary they filmed in Cairo and a short documentary by Khalifa about the henna ritual, they are also teasing an exciting opportunity to elevate writers and get more short films made.

Women are often weary of giving their stories away, because they are misunderstood by those in power and/or made to lose ownership over their narratives. “We want to own our own intellectual property,” asserts Khalifa. “A lot of the time, you sell your work and it becomes an ‘original’ of another production company. But if we’re going to highlight our stories, we shouldn’t give them away.”

Mooro adds: “The whole point is to retain the authenticity and nuances of representation and culture. We want to work with other people to tell their stories in a different way to the traditional way of ‘that’s mine now.’”

Zola Studios’ focus on SWANA stories stems from the desire to combat stereotypes that have too long been reproduced to the detriment of those living in/coming from the region. The amount of SWANA perspectives across creative disciplines is under 1 percent.

In March, Mooro traveled to Egypt to support an NGO that helps displaced Palestinians. “Something in me shifted then,” she shares. “It really hit home that this is what the world sees in us: that we are the bad guys. Arabs and Muslims are villainized in the media. When there’s a war in Sudan and a genocide in Gaza, the outside world doesn’t care. I do believe that stories can change that. They change who deserves to take up space and who deserves to be alive.”

As co-founders, they remind each other of the bigger purpose of their work, to avoid falling into pits of despair. Apart from building a production house, they are also working to share the strength and comfort they have cultivated together with a wider community.

They set up an email thread and will be organizing events online and in real life, while preparing for their first rollouts for film festival season this autumn. “Anyone in the community can email anyone in the community, but everyone’s emails are protected,” explains Khalifa. Mooro continues: “Everyone is co-creating this community. If someone has a book launch or an album coming out, we want to elevate them. A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.”

Beyond sharing creative work, the community is intended to be a safer space for discussion. “I want to create a talking circle that you can come to and say, ‘I really don’t feel great right now,’ or ‘I need help with my career’ without judgment,” says Khalifa. “I’ve been hosting Ramadan dinners at Soho House London and every year I get the same feedback: we didn’t know this community existed. The SWANA region is big and there’s a lot of us. Why don’t we have a collective that we could stand by each other and have safety? The more we come together the more we have strength.”