Bouchra: a striking animation about identity, connection and creativity

Bouchra is many things. She’s a queer filmmaker living in New York; an expat; a lover; a daughter; a jackal-headed human. Animated in Blender, the 3D software best-known for being used by Gints Zilbalodis to craft the Oscar-winning Flow (2024), Bouchra is the feature debut of Morocco-born visual artist Meriem Bennani (who voices the semi-autobiographical title character) and Israel-born documentarian Orian Barki. Their film follows in the wake of 2 Lizards (2020), an Instagram-serialised animation that the duo developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, in which they portrayed anthropomorphic lizards living through lockdown. The filmmakers and their community found solace in using art as a vehicle for interrogating the self and healing one another, an effect that is honed and focused in this first feature, which plays in the same universe of diverse and queer creatures.

The residues of lockdown experiences permeate Bouchra. Individuals are divided yet connected through separate shots, storyboard panels and desktop windows. Bouchra lives and works in New York City, but her mother, Aicha, lives in Casablanca, Morocco. Bouchra is developing an autofictional film about a relationship with another woman and how her family reacted to it. Amid this process, she longs for a proper reconciliation with Aicha, with whom conversations about identity have been forever skipped over.

Physical contact is at the core – lingering moments of hands touching; clothing hugging figures tightly; lips meeting and parting in a trailing string of shared saliva. The filmmakers lend to faces, household objects and caressed materials a hyperreal level of detail, evoking longing, belonging and memory. With an ocean separating her from her mother, the best approximation to touch that Bouchra can achieve is to drag Aicha’s voice call window around the screen carefully with her cursor. Her moist, expressive canine eyes well with tears as she talks.

Stylistically, the film is a striking anomaly. Its glossy digital environments and dynamic angles feel akin to video-game machinima, while its metatextual reflections and gently charming hangouts recall the work of Chantal Akerman and Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) respectively. Bouchra speaks through a near-miraculous blend of outsider art modes. Different fragments of its grammar will be recognised by different viewers: by queer audiences, diaspora, gamers, furries, and children of the internet. Arrange and assemble these pieces, however, and we’re met with a human whole – entirely individual, pleading to be understood.

► Bouchra is in UK cinemas 7 August.