A hen, a ghost in a vacuum cleaner and now talking canids

Daniel Nelson

Films are getting odder. After a Thai drama about ghosts who inhabit vacuum cleaners (A Useful Ghost) and a people-smuggling drama seen through the eyes of a chicken (Hen), we now have Bouchra, a Moroccan mother-daughter movie acted by canids.

It is a smart, lesbian film that has been described as ”an Italian-Moroccan-American adult computer-animated arthouse drama”.

Bouchra is a 35-year-old gay Moroccan filmmaker with writer’s block. She lives in New York and has long, difficult phone calls with her mother in Casablanca (apparently drawn directly from recordings of co-director Meriem Bennani's own conversations). They and all the other characters are animations with animal heads but clear human voices.

Its elements include friendships, loves and family relationships, the life artistic and the attractions of the two cultures of migrant lives.

I found it weird and distracting, though theoretically the dehumanisation of the characters prevents stereotyping of people by their looks and puts the emphasis on the dialogue.

It’s an intriguing experiment, but unless you are a ready-for-anything cinephile, perhaps you should seek out a trailer to see if this novel approach to filmic storytelling pulls your strings.