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Bouchra is available for purchase or rental on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Orian Yani Barki, Merriem Benani

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.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Bouchra is filled with… small incidental details that dominate one’s attention, puncturing the otherwise fairly banal sheen of the piece as a whole and revealing a distinctive, weirdly effective work struggling valiantly against its miniscule [sic] budget.”–Grant Watson, Fiction Machine (festival screening)