Bouchra

OPENS AT METROGRAPH June 26

METROGRAPH IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE RUN OF Bouchra
STARTING June 26.

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.

A Film Movement release.

Writer/directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani in person for opening weekend.

Accompanying the run of Barki and Bennani’s Bouchra, Metrograph presents Focus on Orian Barki & Meriem Bennani, a film program that includes their new feature alongside a special one-night-only showing of 2 Lizards, the duo’s 2020 web series, and the 2019 short film Culturesport: Rotterdam 95 by their Bouchra creative collaborators John Michael Boling and Jason Coombs.