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| Images courtesy of Film Movement |
Moroccan born New York based artist and animator Meriem
Bennani and Orian Barki first achieved prominence on the digital filmmaking
animated landscape with their COVID-19 pandemic set and rendered web series 2
Lizards back in 2020. Providing the
voice acting themselves and produced from their home of Brooklyn, it lasted
eight episodes and became a viral hit eventually landing on Adult Swim’s Off
the Air anthological program.
Featuring a New York City populated by anthropomorphic animals, it was a
mature adult-oriented answer to Disney’s Zootopia series or The Bad
Guys with a distinctly queer furry leaning while also expressing a
particular demographic experience which is at once singular and oddly
universal.
Four years later, Bennani and Barki returned for their debut
feature animated film Bouchra which was commissioned by Milan’s
Fondazione Prada and animated on the Blender platform. Originally with the working title For Aicha
before being retitled Bouchra, it represents a bold forward step in
independent, distinctly Middle Eastern animation or rather chronicling the Moroccan
New York queer experience through the fantasy vision of a jackal. With production lasting two years and
involving some twenty crew members in New York with some live action footage
shot for background plates, the film also reunited the directors with some of
their fellow creative colleagues including composer Flavien Berger. Although it was hard with creative
differences and rewrites, many of which played out dramatically onscreen in the
title character’s saga, Bouchra emerged as a specific experience with
curiously universal appeal.
Like The People’s Joker, Bouchra is a mature
and moving queer story told with non-traditional methods and elliptical editing
styles. The animation is sometimes
clunky while other times painterly and the frank disarming ordinariness of
human sexuality shown through the use of animals as characters instead of
people, it runs very close towards being outright fur bait. However, those willing to embrace the
creative choices will find a warm and nuanced immigrant story about family,
home cultures, and bisexuality that is as much about the creators behind the
animation as it is about finding one’s purpose and place in an increasingly
alienating world.
Bouchra has echoes of Sentimental
Value in that the protagonist is making a semi-autobiographical film about
an uneasy family relationships and dynamics.
But it differs in that Bouchra immigrated from Morocco to the New
York City years ago to live more freely as a lesbian, having adapted to
American life well but still stymied by awkward yet necessary conversations involving
coming out to her more culturally traditional mother. What at first seems like a non-linear
narrative is actually the film within the film revealing Bouchra’s own
story with the maturity coming in the form of questioning but her home culture
without also rejecting it. Oftentimes,
immigrants wind up rejecting their culture and upbringing in favor of the
culture of the land the settled in, a factor detailed early on in films like The
Brutalist. Instead of letting go of
Moroccan cultural norms, Bouchra questions them graciously with her mother while
finding room for bonding without the need to hide her true self from a parent.
Initially debuting at Prada with the title For Aicha
in 2024 before the film was reworked and re-edited into a feature where it made
its festival debut in Toronto and New York circa 2025, Bouchra went on
to become the first animated feature nominated for Toronto’s Platform Prize and
though it lost to the Ukrainian film To the Victory!, a month later it
took home the Gold Q-Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival before
being picked up and released theatrically in the summer of 2026 by Film
Movement. A homegrown do-it-yourself
endeavor which indeed has some rusty edges with the animation but nevertheless possesses
a frank down-to-Earth honesty none of the Disney animated sagas will come near,
Bouchra is far from perfect and at times the meta-fictional
narrative-within-a-narrative approach can indeed become confusing. But for thinking adults who would like their
cartoon characters to have sexual encounters while dealing with real world
pathos and gravitas, Bouchra moves the needle off the dial just enough
to draw us in while still giving an oddly entirely relatable Middle Easterner
in New York human story a distinctive edge.
--Andrew Kotwicki
