FEATURING: Voices of Yto Barrada, Marriam Benani, Dounia Berrada
PLOT: A New York-based Moroccan coyote film director develops an autobiographical movie exploring her relationship with her mother.
COMMENTS: Directors Barki and Benami built a reputation for cinematic weirdness with their previous collaboration, the 2020 short-film series “2 Lizards,” which was featured on Adult Swim‘s surreal mixtape program “Off the Air.” Bouchra, the team’s animated feature film debut, centers on the titular heroine, a young Moroccan woman living and working as a film director in New York City. The narrative alternates between her present life and her past in Casablanca, blurring reality with reconstruction as Bouchra attempts, through her work, to process her relationship with her semi-estranged Moroccan mother. The tensions between them stem from taboos surrounding Bouchra’s sexual identity that went unaddressed and ignored for years. Through calls with her mother in the present day, and reconstructions/reminisces of a short lesbian affair in Casablanca, these issues gradually come to light. Plus, the characters are all anthropomorphic animals of various species.
Like Endless Cookie (2025), Bouchra stands out due to the dissonance between its stylized animation and its grounded themes. The aesthetic—furry-inspired anthropomorphic animals in a neon-soaked, almost cyberpunk-like urban environment—can be off-putting at first. But this isn’t sci-fi or high fantasy. Naturalistic dialogue, overlapping and full of awkward stuttering, hints at something closer to reality. This is, essentially, a tale of familial ties, sexual orientation, and the way traditional societies consciously exile whatever disrupts the status quo. It is an empathetic tale, eager to show compassion and understand easily-disturbed norms. The furry aesthetic reveals the queerness of the bodies, their hairy, androgynous nature. This is especially apparent in two short, tasteful yet erotically-charged intimate segments. The dark color palette of New York contrasts with the warmer tones of Casablanca. Often, the uncanny, detailed digital character animations are juxtaposed against real background photographs of Morocco, for a documentary-like feel.
In the end, this movie can be viewed not only as American independent cinema, but also as Moroccan Diasporic Cinema. And since Moroccan cinema isn’t that common, this work can be recommended to fans of world cinema adventures.
FEATURING: Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim, Jose Zuniga
PLOT: When their daughter disappears after developing green-glowing hands, her moms begin to suspect a mega-corporation involved in a tainted cat food scandal.
COMMENTS: Claire and Shareen are just trying to get by. Shareen works as a trash picker. Claire waits tables at a trendy sushi joint called “Naga Saki,” whose only perk is the free sushi she brings home to their daughter. Honey, one of those unusual four year olds who prefers raw fish and wasabi to mac n’ cheese, can’t get enough of Naga Saki’s specialty roll, “kissing fish,” a variety with obscenely red lips. When the little girl starts intermittently glowing green—a phenomenon her mothers never directly witness—they take her to various specialists. A pediatrician, a child psychologist, and a fortune-teller all fail to figure out the cause of the “green.” Honey then mysteriously vanishes, as stories about glowing cats begin to take over the news.FreshKill innovatively conveys its central mystery through endless streams of information. News reports, radio broadcasts, snippets from talk shows, and commercials regularly interrupt the narrative, adding clues to the overarching plot. Accounts of the real-life debacle with the infamous garbage barge alternate with fictional news items, like the corporate takeover of a major television news station by “GX,” a conglomerate that over the course of the film also buys up pet food products. The GX slogan, “because ‘We Care’” ominously repeats amid stories of a stray hydrogen bomb “harmlessly” dissolving in the ocean and a recall of GX’s recently acquired cat food brand.
Along with the many communication technologies on display—from televisions, to radios, to Web 1.0—the diverse cast speak a variety of languages, often code-switching in the middle of a sentence. Despite an unconventional makeup, family remains the anchor of the narrative, even as it spins off into various directions. While searching for Honey, Claire and Shareen interact with the residents of a neighborhood homeless enclave, their friends, and their own difficult parents. Claire’s mother is the diva-like talk show host of a program on public access who refers to Shareen as “Shirley.” Shareen’s father is a retired cop whose wife left him because he could never be off-duty, and who hasn’t caught on that his daughter isn’t straight. Supporting characters represent such various voices as the queer community, Wall Street, the homeless, computer hackers, immigrants, and environmental activists, contributing to the channel-surfing aesthetic.
The owner of Naga Saki rushes to buy the last of the kissing fish stock, just as her customers, too, begin glowing green. One night, a friend of the sushi chef/hacker Jiannbin sees the kissing fish glowing, but no one else does, and so they remain skeptical. Eventually, Claire puts two and two together, insisting the contaminated fish must have infected Honey. She convinces Jiannbin to hack into the GX website to see what he can find.
Director Shu Lea Cheang pioneered the use of what we called “new media” back in the ’90s. Primarily known as a visual artist who works with digital technologies, one of her early works comprised a website complete with interactive chat rooms. A similar sense of hypertext and polyphony pervades her first feature film. The messages of corporate news sources contrast with the word on the street. Text scrolls sometimes appear along the bottom of the screen, and Godard-ian intertitles with phrases like “Security = Control” intercept the imagery.
The “green” people’s speech gradually becomes glitched and warped until it’s completely unintelligible. Just as the image modes skip around, the soundtrack features varying styles of music, like a radio set to scan all available channels. A song by Sheila Chandra, who rarely allows her work to be licensed, pairs beautifully with an emotionally charged moment of Claire and Shareen grappling with Honey’s absence.
While the story of a missing kid could easily get dark and depressing, FreshKill maintains an ironic sense of black humor. The script consistently plays on the many meanings of the word “green” and its cultural connotations. Everyone gets mocked, from the finance tycoons who speak in corporate buzzwords to people who mindlessly follow the “green” movement by buying into eco-branding.
It’s easy to see why FreshKill experienced a resurrection in the 21st century with a 2026 Criterion Collection release. The seeming prescience of its themes demonstrates how these “contemporary agita” were already a part of American cultural discourse thirty years ago. Green may equal “environment,” but Cheang never loses sight of how it also always equals “money.” In the closing scenes, Naga Saki gets re-branded as “Mumbo Gumbo,” now specializing in farm-raised catfish, completely free of toxins!
“In the year 2700, the year of the toads, ‘Asche’ was a burnt-out city. Too big for its souls who banded together in dark basements. It was an unrestrained wild animal, ready to pee in Death’s face at any time. And its residents were equal to it in every way. Highly unlikely for a pure heart to survive.”–Flaming Ears introductory narration
DIRECTED BY: Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek
FEATURING: Susanna Heilmayr, Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl
PLOT: The lives of a comic book artist, a serial arsonist, and an extraterrestrial converge when Volley burns down the comix press. The artist, Spy, goes in search of vengeance, only to be beaten up by the bouncers at the club where Volley performs; Nun, Volley’s alien girlfriend, then finds Spy lying unconscious in the gutter and falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Volley develops the hots for her chauffeur, and a young girl graffitis the city with the image of a flower vase.
BACKGROUND:
Scheirl and Pürrer became lovers in the 1980s and started making “lesbian punk home movies” in Pürrer’s Vienna apartment with a Super 8 camera and homemade props. They would later form the band Sta-Prestto make their own film soundtracks.
The Catholic symbolism in the film reflects the predominant conservatism of Viennese society at the time, in contrast to its very small punk scene of musicians and artists.
The soundtrack features the music of local punk bands, sometimes even capturing live performances. None of the music was formally licensed.
When Scheirl and Pürrer’s films toured women’s and feminist film festivals in the 1990s, the S&M content often proved controversial and sometimes led to walkouts.
The then-contemporary popularity of Fluxus theater led some viewers to assume Flaming Ears‘ outrageous style was a deliberate mockery of their performance art. This was not the intention of the filmmakers, who were simply expressing their punk aesthetic.
A. Hans Shceirl (Nun), also credited as Angela Hans Scheirl, is a transgender man who transitioned with testosterone in 1996. He later directed the infamous Dandy Dust (1998) and became a painter and professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s a lot of eye-catching and provocative imagery throughout Flaming Ears, with a plethora of unusual proclivities on display. But one of its most mysterious moments occurs when the otherwise unknown Blood suddenly shows up out of the blue to grant Spy’s rotting corpse the kiss of life. It’s confusing, oddly touching yet revolting, and emblematic of Flaming Ears‘ fairy tale combination of enchantment and grotesquerie. It’s also a major pivot point in the splintered narrative.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Erotic arson; the healing power of alien saliva
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: What isn’t weird about this movie? The two items listed above are only the very weirdest elements. There’s also furniture humping (with lighter fluid used as lube), an immortal alien whose severed limbs come back to life, and an oddly suggestive conversation about gardening cacti. With a rough and ready DIY aesthetic, Flaming Ears is art-house done No Wave-style. At any moment the live action can be interrupted by a stop-motion animated sequence, a prop, or a painting. In one memorable scene a cardboard cutout, with a cartoonish line-drawn face, replaces one of the actors. The dialogue is obscurely poetic and the futuristic setting thinly sketched, leaving the viewer on their own to figure out what exactly is going on, like an alien crash-landed on an unknown planet.
Flaming Ears re-release trailer
COMMENTS: Usually, films that take place in a future dystopia explain the reasons behind societal collapse, but FlamingEars ignores Continue reading 69*. FLAMING EARS (1992)→
PLOT: Newly arrived at school, Utena finds herself in a duel for the freedom of the beautiful and mysterious Anthy, and must fend off multiple challengers while navigating her new-found betrothal.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: For an ostensible transfer of a popular TV series to the big screen, Adolescence of Utena delights not only in jettisoning any obeisance to its source material, but moves in strange and unpredictable directions. Whenever you think you’ve got Utena’s number, you definitely don’t, right up to its outrageous conclusion.
COMMENTS: The first moments of this big-screen successor to the popular manga and TV series “Revolutionary Girl Utena” suggest a fish-out-of-water story, as the impossibly wide-eyed title character is led on a tour of the architectural wonder and human-interaction Petri dish that is the Ohtori Academy. Who will she meet? What will she learn? Who will become friends and enemies? A classic shōjo manga in the making. And as soon as those moments end, you can forget all about them, because Utena’s encounter with the cheekily devoted Anthy will shortly become the only thing of importance.
The two girls have an unusual meet-cute, with Utena wandering onto a flower-festooned platform and inadvertently instigating a duel for the rights to Anthy’s hand. It turns out this kind of accidental heroism happens to Utena a lot; for such a powerful champion, Utena is remarkably unsure of herself. We soon learn why, but the careful crafting of her character lends great potency to her developing relationship with Anthy, empowering what could easily be reduced to cliché. A scene in which the two girls have to create life-drawings of each other, far from feeling obvious or superfluous, develops real romantic power.
All of this takes place in a lush and fantastic design that adds another layer of surrealism and wonder. The school is a wild mashup of Roman architecture and civic planning by M. C. Escher. Places and people are all decked out in a wild palette of colors, with heightened military costumes complemented by crazily flowing hairstyles of pink, magenta, and green. Director Ikuhara supplements these visions with intriguing abstractions, like the radio hosts who only appear in silhouette. Even when the plot and backstory become too dense to be certain you’re following, the visuals are never less than striking, often gasp-inducing.
Adolescence of Utena is already unusual, but the final third raises the bar significantly as our heroine begins to suspect that the universe is hiding a fundamental truth about its nature. She’s right, in a way that rhymes thematically with fellow 1999 release The Matrix; but where Keanu Reeves’ Neo had to be flushed out of a simulation to find clarity, Utena makes her escape by turning into a uterus-shaped hot rod and doing battle with a city-sized monster car. It’s a remarkable visual, and it’s hard to undersell the surprise generated by the pivot the movie takes at this juncture. The film’s final image, with the two lead characters in a nude embrace and riding their sex luge into the horizon, is a fitting denouement for a film that has committed fully to following its own path.
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