In addition to her theatrical career, Josephine Baker starred in four French films. Zouzou was her first talkie. She plays the film’s titular character, a laundress who becomes a star performer and pines for her adopted brother who loves her best friend. While the story neither centralizes Baker’s Blackness as part of her character’s identity nor offers any overt commentary on the racial issues of the time, it does not ultimately permit her to become the love interest of a white man, reinforcing anti-Black prejudices and social norms. While Baker was allowed more social and economic freedom in her adopted country of France than she had experienced in the United States, she was rarely presented in similar ways to her white counterparts. In this film and its corresponding advertisements, her character is othered as “exotic” or generally childlike and innocent rather than as a typically glamorous leading lady. In her innocence, she could be sought after and entrapped but not the other way around. Josephine Baker’s presence in all her films had a powerful international impact, bringing Black American culture as well as a multifaceted and sometimes contradictory version of Black womanhood to the screen. Despite her exotification in Zouzou, her role as a sensual yet innocent and playful character suggested a complexity that stood in sharp contrast to the stereotypical roles available to Black actors in America.