Photo: Bouchra, BFI
Daniel Nelson
Films are getting odder. After a recent 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 with clear human voices.
Its elements include friendships, loves and family relationships, the life artistic, the attractions of the two cultures of migrant lives.
Sight and Sound wrote that “Stylistically, the film is a striking anomaly. Its glossy digital environments and dynamic angles feel akin to video-game machinima”, using a variety of film-making approaches, but that “we’re met with a human whole – entirely individual, pleading to be understood.”
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 it pulls your strings.