Bouchra by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki
Event Details
Tickets & Info
The 20th edition of Mizna’s Twin Cities Arab Film Fest closes with two special screenings copresented with the Walker and a reception at 5 pm.
Bouchra opens with a long-distance phone call between Aicha (voiced by artist Yto Barrada), living in Casablanca, and her daughter, Bouchra, living in New York. The two discuss the long-avoided subject of Bouchra’s queer identity and romantic life. Based on director Meriem Bennani’s real conversations with her own mother, the film fictionalizes and reimagines the relationship through 3D animation, setting the scene in a world populated by anthropomorphized animals. When Bouchra feels creatively stuck, she draws inspiration from the conversation, writing a film script to process her complex family dynamics. Bennani’s debut feature combines self-reflexive documentary techniques with an inventive visual and narrative style. 2025, Italy/Morocco/US, DCP, in English, Arabic, and French with English subtitles, 85 min.
Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki will be in conversation remotely following the screening.
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Content note: This film contains depictions of sexual intimacy.
You are welcome to step in and out of the space at any time during your visit.
Meriem Bennani’s video installations and sculptures are informed by the online circulation of global cultures. Frequently rooted in the specifics of Moroccan life and postcolonial history, her work speaks to the hybrid nature of contemporary cultural flows. She combines elements of reality television, documentary film, telenovela, music videos, science fiction, and animated cartoons in her videos, exaggerating media tropes in what she describes as a “hyperactivity of genre.” Using strategies of immersion, duplication, multiplicity, and remix, Bennani blends a powerful mix of humor and critique, reaffirming the power of family and home while analyzing larger systems of power across a networked world.
Orian Barki is a filmmaker based in New York. She often shoots and edits her raw, character-driven documentaries herself. Her documentary work has been featured on ESPN, PBS, The Fader, Vogue, Nowness, Le Cinéma Club, Dazed Magazine, and more.
Mizna presents contemporary, critical, and experimental art, writing, and film centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) artists. In 2026, Mizna celebrates the twentieth edition of their flagship program, the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival. It aligns with Mizna’s broader 2026 film programming—Looking Forward, Looking Back—which confronts the visual record of SWANA cinema, including the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival and demands radical new meanings from the archive. The organization also publishes a biannual print literary and art journal, Mizna, and a digital platform for literary and multidisciplinary work, Mizna Online. Mizna additionally offers readings, film series, performances, public art commissions, and community events that have featured more than 1,000 local and transnational writers, filmmakers, and artists.
Copresented by Mizna.
