Wrestling with writer’s block for her first film, Bouchra, a queer Moroccan jackal living in NYC, starts having difficult yet overdue phone calls with her mother in Casablanca that begin influencing the project. Balancing the precarity of working as an artist in New York, the rift in her identity between her two homes and an array of friendships and romantic interests, Bouchra’s emotional reckoning with her mother and herself becomes her path to expression.

With a lived-in granularity and unmistakable visual style, Bouchra, the feature debut from acclaimed visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki (best known together from their 2020 web series 2 Lizards), is a singular portrait effortlessly towing the line between documentary, visual art and resonant family drama. Deeply felt, surprisingly sexy and formally adventurous, Bennani and Barki’s distinctive debut forges new ground that “will make it a classic of queer cinema for years to come” (Next Best Picture).

"This may be a story featuring animated coyotes, frogs and other animals on screen, but the particulars are very human: conversations stilted with pauses because neither party can easily open up; hidden ephemera and objects held dearly because of what they represent; uneasiness followed by relief after a simple affirmation of love..." - Variety

"The sheer intimacy with which everything in the film is presented, even with the relative remove of anthropomorphizing all the characters, is what makes it sing; the unrealness emphasizes the real narratives and emotions behind those digital facades." - RogerEbert.com

"Where autobiography and documentary—especially about marginalized communities—promise revelation and understanding, Bouchra holds us at a slight distance...Bouchra proposes that we might be moved by a life, even implicated in it, without being able to fully know it." - Film Comment

"Far from reiterating tired binaries -- tradition versus modernity, elders versus youngsters -- the film embraces the beauty of contradictions with open arms." - The Guardian

"An aesthetically bold, personal animation...an inventive approach." - Film Stage