Bouchra

In this striking animation set in a world of anthropomorphic animals, a queer coyote breaks the wall of silence with her mother nine years after her coming out.

Bouchra, a coyote, is a New York–based Moroccan filmmaker in the throes of creating a semi-autobiographical feature. Unable to access the inspiration she seeks, she decides to call her mother, Aïcha, who lives in Casablanca, to address the topic they’ve left untouched for almost a decade: Bouchra’s sexuality. Despite staying in touch, mother and daughter have never discussed Bouchra’s same-sex relationships, nor her ‘out’ life in the US. As the filmmaker starts devising storyboards, we’re pulled into a genre-defying hybrid work that blends memory, fantasy and metafiction.

Winning the top queer prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, Bouchra recalls directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s 2020 miniseries 2 Lizards in its evocation of a hyperreal world where animals act and interact like humans. Blending live action, photogrammetry and 3D scanning, it uses actual snippets of conversation between Bennani and her mother to launch into confabulation, with Bouchra’s film-within-a-film offering a medium for catharsis, conjecture and wish fulfilment. Empathetic and visionary, Bouchra meditates on the act of mediation itself – how cinema, just like discussions held across distance and time, necessarily hinges on our version of the truth.

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival