“One of the most intimate and political animations of the year.”

Playing in this year’s Currents section of the New York Film Festival is Bouchra, directed by Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani. The placement in the Currents section says a lot; Bouchra is a film that isn’t chasing the traditional prestige or red-carpet slot but instead combines experimentation and hybridity with the deeply personal. Because of this it is startling, a computer-animated film with 3D anthropomorphic characters placed against live-action backgrounds. This mixture of form results in stunning and unexpected shots, with beautiful, hilarious, and queer images. The characters are animals: coyotes, cows, lizards, bears, elephants, etc. On paper it may sound like Zootopia, but this is something very different: a queering, coming-out film fitted with fur, scales, and horns.  In many ways, the film builds on the directors’ earlier short 2 Lizards, which used similar techniques to capture pandemic-era New York, but with Bouchra the technique deepens and matures to tell a story that is more personal, more painful, and more precious.  It’s one of the most intimate and political animations of the year.

At the center of the film is Bouchra herself, a queer Moroccan coyote living in New York who is preoccupied, obsessed really, with how her sexuality has shaped her relationship with her mother. She wants to move forward with her life and her career, but she desires further reconciliation and introspection. She is haunted by memories of coming out to her parents and her mother’s response to it. Importantly, Bouchra is a filmmaker, and the way she can move on is through her art, confronting the past and the silences by making a highly personal film.

Narratively, Barki and Bennani take an audacious approach. The film is split between the real-life story of Bouchra and her mother and the meta-version of the film that Bouchra is creating. In the fictional meta-film, Bouchra visits her mother Aicha, a celebrated painter. Their conversations are lively but limited, as they talk almost exclusively about painting and art, the work that defines Aicha’s world. Sexuality, queerness, and Bouchra’s inner life are never broached.

In the main story, filmmaker Bouchra is often on the phone with her mother, Aicha, who is a cardiologist in Casablanca. These conversations are drawn from Bennani’s actual phone calls with her own mother and are bracingly honest, often raw. Barki and Bennani blur fiction and autobiography so thoroughly that it becomes impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. With Barki and Bennani voicing the characters, the casting deepens this effect.

If 2 Lizards felt lighthearted and funny in its observation of city life, Bouchra is different. This film covers personal subjects for Bennani with the meta-narrative rooted in her own life.  It’s about her sexuality, her coming of age, and her coming out to her mother. The small scale of production, with Bennani and Barki directing, voicing, and editing much of the material, only reinforces this intimacy. It is not a high-budget studio product, but an artwork carved from private conversations and framed by the hybrid animation and live-action background textures. 

The dialogue itself is fascinating. Sometimes it feels off, flat and strange. And yet that’s precisely why it works. Because the characters are portrayed as animals and because the language is filtered through translation and through various tongues (Arabic, French, English) of immigrants adapting to new countries, the wrongness and clumsiness of the languages become part of the realism. Characters don’t always speak like native speakers, but they always come across as true, with pauses, hesitations, blunt statements, and even banality. Bennani herself has said she couldn’t always tell whether a scene was fascinating or boring, and that feels exactly right; some viewers will vibe with the film’s rhythm, others may find it banal. But those who settle into its cadence will find it touching, political, and deeply sincere.

The film is also a portrait of migration. The opening subway scenes and city landscapes in New York are gorgeously rendered, but the film also stretches into Morocco. Languages intermingle through the different spoken words, but also through building and street signs and through the city spaces and buildings. Bouchra quietly becomes a film about immigration in the United States that doesn’t fit the usual template (not Hispanic or Latino, nor framed in clichés) but insists on the migratory condition as a texture of life, of speech, and of love.

Building on this complexity are the other parts of the story. Bouchra’s circle includes her ex-girlfriend Niki, a cow, with whom she broke up after nine years, only then to be offered a job by Niki. Her closest confidant is a lizard. The film punctuates itself with small, devastating, and funny moments: a radio host speaks about sexual desire, or the line “You never hooked up with someone in your own language,” followed by the deflating clarification that a fling with a French bunny doesn’t count. Barki and Bennani’s specificity is absurd, but it also hits at the complexity of desire across cultures and tongues and the care and dedication they employed when making the film.

Visually, the directors cite Chungking Express as an inspiration.  It’s evident, as their play with color, their use of jumpy rhythms, and their creation of the city as a character allude to this influence. Yet the look is also wholly their own with the uncanny mixture of CG animals with live action streets. Unlike Zootopia, which seeks immersion into a new animated world, Bouchra thrives on dissonance between live action and animation and old and new languages and cultures.

This dissonance is where the film’s charm lies. At first it can feel too strange, too cute, and even banal. But as it accumulates and as time is spent with these characters, the emotional truth of Bennani’s conversations comes forward.  Bouchra becomes moving; it’s political in its portrayal of immigrant and queer life and it’s personal in its depiction of a daughter and mother talking across continents and silences. Bouchra is about acknowledging what remains unresolved (the gaps, the silences, and love) and reconciling with the past and moving forward with life.

For those who vibe with it, Bouchra is a touching and inventive film, unlike anything else playing at the festival this year. For those who don’t, it may feel like little more than a banal experiment about mature adult cartoon animals. But either way, it is a film that insists on new forms and a new cinematic language. For this alone, it should be sought out and cherished.