BlackStar Film Festival 2026: In Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s “Bouchra,” Film is Therapy

There are two films in Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani‘s Bouchra, showing at the 2026 BlackStar Film Festival. The first film centers the eponymous Bouchra, a queer Moroccan jackal and filmmaker living in the expansive New York art scene, paralyzed by the fear of the blank page. She is eager to tell the story of coming out to her mother who lives in Casablanca. But she is unable to write or sketch anything until they exchange numerous tense but tender conversations. The film is the simple but nuanced story of a mother-daughter relationship and the complexities of coming out. It also examines social pressure and the fear, as a parent, of sharing your thoughts about your queer child with friends and relatives. 

The second film is skillfully written into the first and flows seamlessly like unperturbed water. As you might have predicted, this film centers the characters that Bouchra has created. It’s a perfect film-in-a-film moment. Here, there’s a lesbian filmmaker who has returned home after nine years away and must discuss an avoided conversation during her limited stay. There’s Lima, a single mother, with whom she shares loving stares and moments. But what gets centered is not just the relationship with her radio broadcaster friend or Lima, but the unspoken tension between mother and daughter. 

The two films are culled and cobbled together from Meriem and her mother’s quotidian exchanges, anchored on anything and everything, but importantly, on avoiding talk about her sexuality and all it carries. From their phone calls, shared between Casablanca and New York, there’s a tender, unique, and distinct devotion toward each other. They talk about maderotherapy, gossip about relatives, discuss the weather, and bond on the demanding nature of work. These are easy and simple exchanges. But in neither the first nor second film do they talk about Meriem’s coming-out letter which she sent nine years ago. There is a seemingly wilful avoidance of the subject until Meriem resumes asking her mother questions: Why was it so difficult to talk to me about it? What was it like? Although their fragile yet strained exchange sparks Meriem’s creative breakthrough, it opens a journey through family bonds, daughterhood, and the thrill of love. Unsurprisingly, this is the film’s emotional core and spine. 

As mentioned, Bouchra is two films populated with distinct characters that share limited but connected similarities. Performed in English, French, and Arabic, the film carries, in its first and second act, a distinctively diarist flair and, in its third act, an unmistakable documentary sensibility. Orian and Meriem’s debut animation feature project recalls the age of creative nonfiction, where writers and essayists self-flagellate by capturing and publishing intimate anecdotes for public consumption. Creative nonfiction, for its propensity to straddle factual truth and invented truth, has been critiqued for being repleted with contradictions. It has also been mischaracterised as journalistic writing that serves one purpose: delivering information. This is the creative tension and complexity that Orian and Meriem’s animation carries. 

It’s dotted with docudrama and diarist elements while consciously, consistently, and creatively restricting the label. By distorting historical reality, inventing dialogue and characters, and altering timelines to maximize dramatic impact, the film, in the hands of its virtuoso filmmakers, blends fact and fiction not to mislead its audiences or create the archetypal coming-out queer Arab film. Rather, the filmmakers use these genres to tell an empathetic story of a daughter and mother learning to find language for a topic that resists words. For almost a decade, mother and daughter live in forced silence when sexual conversation surfaces. But when they find a language to articulate their concerns and fears, they push away their socially-enforced silence and exchange loving words. 

This is the beauty of Bouchra. It’s the beauty of finding therapy and safety in thoughtful and loving exchanges. It’s the beauty of making a tender film from a lived experience. And it’s the beauty of sharing that film with audiences who can connect with it on multiple levels.