Bouchra

Multihyphenate artists Barki and Bennani’s playful animation/live-action hybrid film à clef offers up a delightfully idiosyncratic look at the travails of the queer expat artist. The title character here is imagined as an anthropomorphic jackal inhabiting a New York City filled with other like critters, a young filmmaker simultaneously dealing with creative crises, her rocky relationship with her mother back in Casablanca, and the pleasures and perils of sex in the city. Drawing on real phone calls and myriad other correspondences, with voice talent courtesy of the directing duo’s friends and family members, this lay-it-on-the-line autofiction is at once startlingly light on its feet and densely layered with insight, not least into the feelings that come of shakily straddling two cultures while belonging fully to neither.