Bouchra

Wrestling with writer’s block for her first film, Bouchra, a queer Moroccan jackal living in New York City, 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, this feature debut from acclaimed visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki (best known for 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 film forges new ground that “will make it a classic of queer cinema for years to come,” according to Next Best Picture.