Exclusive Trailer for Bouchra Presents an Acclaimed, Personal Hybrid Animation

If Hollywood’s animation offerings have been fairly stale of late, look no further than the independent-filmmaking side for one of the year’s most inventive animations. Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki’s animation/live-action hybrid Bouchra is a debut feature that combines vulnerable storytelling, documentary techniques, and an anthropomorphized animated cast to portray a complex relationship between a queer, Moroccan filmmaker and her mother. Ahead of a June 26 release from Film Movement beginning at NYC’s Metrograph, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the trailer and poster.

Here’s the synopsis: “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.”

Jared Mobarak said in his review, “Based on a real-life conversation shared by co-director Meriem Bennani and her own mother, Bouchra (co-directed with Orian Barki and co-written by them and Ayla Mrabet) opens with a phone call. Aicha (Yto Barrada) is checking in on her daughter from Morocco when Bouchra (Bennani) broaches a subject they’ve been avoiding for almost a decade. Stuck creatively, the latter has decided to find emotional catharsis through a script about the complex dynamic shared with her parents and seeks context from the opposite side.”

See the exclusive trailer and poster below: