20th Arab Film Festival Closing Night Film

Screening at Walker Cinema

Sunday, September 27 at 7:00 PM at Walker Cinema

This film contains depictions of sexual intimacy.

ABOUT THE FILM

Bouchra opens with a long-distance phone call between Aicha (voiced by artist Yto Barrada), living in Casablanca, and her daughter, Bouchra, living in New York. The two discuss the long-avoided subject of Bouchra’s queer identity and romantic life. Based on director Meriem Bennani’s real conversations with her own mother, the film fictionalizes and reimagines the relationship through 3D animation, setting the scene in a world populated by anthropomorphized animals. When Bouchra feels creatively stuck, she draws inspiration from the conversation, writing a film script to process her complex family dynamics. Bennani’s debut feature combines self-reflexive documentary techniques with an inventive visual and narrative style.

FILMMAKER BIO

Meriem Bennani makes video installations and sculptures informed by the circulation of global cultures online. Frequently rooted in the specifics of Moroccan life and postcolonial history, her work speaks to the hybrid nature of contemporary cultural flows. Bennani combines elements of reality television, documentary film, telenovela, music videos, science fiction, and animated cartoons in her videos. Exaggerating media tropes in what Bennani describes as a “hyperactivity of genre,” her works reflect the disjointed state of contemporary mediation, an effect she amplifies in installation settings where her moving images are mapped to sculptural projection structures or viewing stations. Using strategies of immersion, duplication, multiplicity, and remix, Bennani blends a powerful mix of humor and critique, reaffirming the power of family and home while analyzing larger systems of power across a networked world.

Orian Barki  is a filmmaker based in New York. She often shoots and edits her raw, character-driven documentaries herself. Her documentary work has been featured on ESPN, PBS, The Fader, Vogue, Nowness, Le Cinéma Club, Dazed Magazine, and more.

PRESENTED BY MIZNA

Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than 25 years, Mizna has been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.