Pottenkijkers: Bouchra

After a summer break, Pottenkijkers returns to our favorite theater De Uitkijk on September 16 with the original, groundbreaking animated film Bouchra (2025), the first feature film by documentary filmmaker Orian Barki and visual artist Meriem Bennani (known for the web series 2 Lizards).

Bouchra, a filmmaker from New York, tries to write about her departure from Casablanca and her mother in Morocco. In the nine years since Bouchra came out, she and her mother have barely spoken. While Bouchra seeks support from her friends in the New York queer scene, she picks up the phone and calls her mother. In doing so, she tries to come to terms with exactly what happened, and with everything that has remained unspoken between them.

Barki and Bennani bring documentary, fiction, improvisation and memory together. Bouchra and her mother appear as coyotes, sometimes in multiple versions at once, as they approach, avoid and repeatedly try to understand one another. Bouchra is not only a film about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, but also about migration, intimacy, and the question of how to tell a story that has not yet reached its end.