Bouchra brings a coyote filmmaker to MUBI
Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki's animated feature moves between New York and Casablanca in near-photoreal rooms — streaming now.
Bouchra is a Moroccan filmmaker in New York, writing an autobiographical film that keeps folding back into the life it is drawn from. Bouchra is also a coyote, in a city of anthropomorphic animals rendered in nearly photoreal rooms and streets. Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki's feature Bouchra has been streaming on MUBI since September 12.
2 Lizards: Episode 1 (2020), the series Bouchra grew from — silent here; the full episode with sound is on Artforum’s Vimeo.
The film's dialogue comes from real phone calls and letters, with characters voiced by the directors' friends and family playing versions of themselves — documentary raw material wearing an animated body. Across 83 minutes, the film moves between New York and Casablanca, between the character's everyday releases and a mother's unresolved feelings about the character's queerness. It landed its U.S. premiere in Currents at the 63rd New York Film Festival.
Bouchra grew out of 2 Lizards, the series Bennani and Barki released serially on Instagram in the first weeks of lockdown in 2020—two computer-generated lizards moving through an emptied New York, swiftly picked up and published by Artforum. What was a coping mechanism at reel length is now a feature-length grammar: rig a body, render a city, and let real voices drive it.
Bennani's practice runs on the same toolchain as any studio shipping a AAA open world—3D animation, avatar-driven character work, photoreal environments — pointed at diaspora, family, and memory instead of traversal. Machinima logic without the game underneath: the avatar turns out to be autofiction, because everyone involved is already playing a version of themselves.
Animation made with game tools, cinema made from avatars — Killscreen watches that border so you don’t have to. The free newsletter delivers it.
