Bouchra, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s unusual, surprising, and often moving debut feature, centers on the relationship between its eponymous character, a queer Moroccan filmmaker living in New York, and her mother Aicha, a painter who lives in Casablanca. Some time in the past, Bouchra had sent a coming out letter to her parents, a confession that we learn was met with nine years of silence about the topic — that is, nearly a decade of conversations which danced around the matter of her sexuality. Now in the planning stages of a semi-autobiographical film, Bouchra occasionally visits her mother in an attempt to understand her side of the story, to get some handle on what she was thinking and feeling during all that time. Structurally, Bouchra has a kind of reflexive, meta-fictional aspect to it: as Bouchra storyboards for the film she is planning to make, we see episodes which are either memories, imaginative projections of the film she will make, or scenes from the film that she has already made and which we are viewing. Also, the film is entirely shot using 3D animation, and in the world of the film, all the characters are different kinds of animals.
The natural question to ask is: why? Why render this story through anthropomorphic animal animation? Like early Richard Linklater, Barki and Bennani display a rare ease with character banter and (voice) performance. Dialogue is often entertaining and witty. Interactions are convincingly naturalistic. There’s even a conversation about an idea for a theme park where the “rides” would be patrons going on reality shows which no would would ever watch, but which one could take home, that could be slotted right into a segment of Slacker (1990). But as in Linklater, the surface naturalism of performance in Bouchra mainly serves as an entertaining cover for, or as a complement to, a deeper conceptual hook, in this case having to do with how the animation renders the contours of the relationship between Bouchra and her mother.
For one thing, the decision to have all the characters be animated animals serves to efface the usual signifiers that one would associate with a film focalized around a character’s sexuality — especially when that character is queer. As one might expect, it is generally hard to figure out the gender or sexual identity of an antelope sitting in a cafe or a lizard on the street. Likewise, the usual behavioral markers which would indicate sexual attraction or repulsion are quite understandably more difficult to read. During a trip to Morocco, Bouchra interacts with a friend’s friend as she’s leaving a radio station — an interaction that she thinks may be a flirtation. For the viewer, who sees only a crudely animated coyote and a bear exchanging conversation, the ambiguity of the interaction is only compounded. For another, as in Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), the animation places lived reality, memory, and fantasy on the same visual plane, refusing the usual markers that would ordinarily permit the viewer to categorize any given scene as one or the other. And what this does across Bouchra is create a very specific tension, in any given scene, between fantasy and reality. As in the would-be flirtation scene, there is an undecidability between what might actually be there and what might be only imagined.
Within the context of the film, the significance of this dynamic is that the central mother-daughter relationship, which is significantly a long-distance one, is one defined by a kind of mutual projection. Bouchra is not, or not simply, a film about a mother slowly coming to terms with her daughter’s sexuality. Rather, it is a film about a mother-daughter relationship where the actions of each party are continually mediated by an anxiety about what the other party might be reading into their actions. On Bouchra’s side, her life in New York is informed by what she thinks her mother imagines she is getting up to; and on her mother’s side, her existence in Casablanca informed by how she thinks Bouchra imagines she is processing having a queer daughter. One of the film’s subplots involves Bouchra hooking up with an older woman, and comprises shots of Bouchra’s mother becoming suspicious of what is going on between them. It is an indication of the film’s overall dynamic that these scenes work simultaneously as Bouchra’s imagined projections of her mother’s suspicions, as well as her mother’s imagined projections of her actions. Like Joanna Arnow’s I Hate Myself 🙂 (2015), albeit with a very different tone, and with 3D animation in place of a diary-film conceit, Bouchra continually refracts its central relationship through this canny meta-fictional play, eventually introducing yet another layer of complexity toward the end of the film.
With all this in mind, we might understand the filmmakers’ decision to animate Bouchra as a rejection of the assumption that there exists some isolable core of natural behavior, in relation to which all animation would be abstraction. Rather, it suggests a conception of behavior closer to that of reality TV, suggesting that even when we aren’t literally being observed by an audience, that our actions cannot but be informed by the roles we think we play in the imaginings of others.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 5.
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