News From Home: Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani on Bouchra

It all begins with a phone call. In Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s shape-shifting feature debut, Bouchra (2025), a 35-year-old queer Moroccan filmmaker finds her life in New York unsettled by a conversation with her mother Aicha, who still lives in Casablanca. Their catch-up begins with the usual idle small talk, until Bouchra gingerly brings up a certain letter she once sent to her parents, a memento that is central to her current scriptwriting project. Her question opens a floodgate of revelations. As buried sentiments resurface, their intensity disturbs the usual rhythms of a loving yet distant mother-daughter bond. When Bouchra embarks on making her film, these moments of subtle emotional friction continue to multiply, as fiction and autobiography mesmerizingly collide. Using material from her own life, she turns familial tension into dialogue, and reimagines romantic encounters by way of storyboarding.

There’s also another form of stylistic rupture that takes place within the world of Bouchra: All of the characters are anthropomorphic animals. Swaggering in leather jackets and voiced by Bennani, Bouchra is portrayed as a stylish North African wolf, a nod to her cultural heritage. Her best friend Yani is a hoodie-wearing gecko, voiced by Barki. Filled with wisecracks and inside jokes, their banter rings endearingly true to life, even as their animal guises add a surreal touch to their millennial sense of humor. The same beguiling mix of realism and maximalism also applies to the rendered cityscapes. Through a mix of 3D animation and video backgrounds, New York comes alive with rain-slicked skyscrapers, rumbling subway carriages, and neon-soaked dive bars. Likewise, Casablanca is cast in cascading pools of sunlight, and the air is flavored with the sounds of energetic radio shows and bustling street markets. Through these specific cultural registers, the film enriches its animal characters with lived-in detail, all while allowing their eccentricities to take flight. A delight for furries across the globe, Bouchra’s sex scenes, for instance, are choreographed with tongue-in-cheek sensuality, adding another dimension of queerness to the character’s representation.

Barki and Bennani first collaborated on the animated web series 2 Lizards (2020), which became a cult phenomenon during the early months of the pandemic. Portraying themselves as, you guessed it, two lizards, the filmmakers brilliantly distilled the feelings of uncertainty and anxiety shared by millions into two-minute vignettes. In the series, they hang out in their apartment, drive through an eerily empty New York, and clap for healthcare workers. As with Bouchra, personal encounters are lent a sociopolitical weight. In one episode, the lizard buddies leave their home to join a Black Lives Matter march. Mixing surreal flourishes with fly-on-the-wall observations, the series encapsulates the pitch-perfect symbiosis between Bennani’s art practice and Barki’s documentary background. While 2 Lizards draws on their shared experiences, Bouchra is a particularly revealing work for Bennani, who brings her own life and family history to bear on her onscreen alter-ego. The feature is also a step up in scale for the codirectors, who welcomed cinematographer John Michael Boling and animation director Jason A. Coombs into their creative cocoon. Speaking to Phuong Le from New York, the filmmaking duo discuss their collaborative process, the generative power of storytelling, and the beauty of loving and living between languages.

MUBI: I really enjoyed 2 Lizards, which took me back to a very particular moment during the pandemic. What is your creative process in terms of codirecting and working together?

ORIAN BARKI: It changes with each project. The more we work together, the more it evolves. 2 Lizards was so spontaneous. We didn’t even think about it as if we were collaborating together, or that we were making a series that would end up being an art piece. We were just posting the videos on Instagram. That was the first time we worked together, so the entire process was very intuitive. The only obvious role—and we didn’t even look at it as a role—was that because Meriem came from animation, she animated the entire series. She then taught me how to animate so I could help with the lip-synching, which was very time-consuming.

MERIEM BENNANI: I have friends who write books together, and I never understood how they do it. And yet, Orian and I are always doing that. At the heart of the process is knowing each other well, and knowing yourself well. I know my shortcomings and where my intuition and comfort lies, and she knows that, too. When an idea arrives, it doesn’t matter who it comes from because we both seize on it. Sometimes, you have an idea, you get excited, and then you feel blocked—like, What’s next? I can just give it to Orian, and she has distance from it. She might go, “I don’t care how this scene looks. Does it add something to the story on a bigger level?” She has the mindset of an editor in terms of what makes a good story. It’s not that I don’t care about storytelling, but I tend to focus on smaller details within individual scenes. When we exchange ideas, it’s really exciting because she’ll crack something that I couldn’t. Sometimes, we’re both blocked. So yes, it’s a vulnerable process.

MUBI: I’m intrigued by the kinds of animals that appear in your films. There are lizards, jackals, and crocodiles—so not domestic animals. What is it about these creatures that drew you to them?

BENNANI: I started working with animals in my art practice. In 2016, I made a video called Fly with a fly as the main character. When I studied animation in college, my final project was a love story between two anthropomorphic dogs. Initially, the idea came from the fact that I didn't like drawing humans. I have also always loved cartoons and cartoon animals. We all work with these archetypes of storytelling that we’ve absorbed since childhood, such as fables or, in my case, the ’90s cartoons that I grew up on. When I first used animals in my work, they were useful because I was filming live-action then. I always needed a narrator because I didn’t want to just direct a documentary in a classic way. With animation, I could create a contrast with the live-action footage and bring something different to the table.

2 Lizards started because I had downloaded 3D animals for another project, and then Orian wanted to do something for fun with these creatures. It’s kind of a series of accidents, but if you break it down, accidents like these are the product of being someone in the world who has received a lot of images and is now making something out of them. So everything has a sociopolitical context. For 2 Lizards, we asked our friends who were playing themselves about the kind of animals they wanted to be. With a feature like Bouchra, because it’s so much more work, you end up really questioning yourself. Where do we stay intuitive? And where do we have to be super intentional? The animals are a mix of both. Bouchra and the way she looks were really considered; she’s a North African wolf. At other times, a character would just be from a deleted scene that we recycled because it takes so long to build a character. Or we’d use an animal with no fur as an extra because fur takes so long to render on a computer. It could become a bit random at some points.

MUBI: Meriem, you bring parts of yourself into the film. Did you find a sense of freedom in using an animal avatar to tell a very personal story?

BENNANI: Yes, but not because the animals are there to hide behind. If anything, I feel very exposed by the film because it’s my voice, and the nature of the dialogue is so real that it almost doesn’t matter that it’s an animal. Throughout the process, I had many moments where I was really nervous. It was incredibly hard because the film felt so intimate. At no point did I go, Oh, at least these are just animals. What the animals allow us to do is to play. By having the anthropomorphic animals, we were in the realm of surrealism, which let us bring a very playful and symbolic approach to cinema, while also being very realistic in other ways.

MUBI: I’m really struck by how New York and Casablanca look in your film. There’s so much cultural and visual specificity to the renderings. Could you walk me through your process of bringing these cities to screen?

BARKI: It’s a collage. For some scenes, we used video backgrounds. Sometimes, we would take inspiration from real life, such as an archive of videos that Meriem had from when she visited home. She would film so many beautiful, poetic moments that she saw on the streets. This footage expresses her love for her home, and the same goes for New York. I wouldn’t call them B-rolls because for me, they are A-rolls. In films, the most beautiful scenes are those in which a character is doing something that doesn’t drive the story forward, but instead brings in life. It’s like opening a window, and all of a sudden, life comes in.

MUBI: I love the moment when Bouchra is in Casablanca and she stops to buy some roasted corn on the street. You can hear the sound of the popping kernels, as well as the sound of the city. There’s an extraordinarily dense soundscape of different kinds of street noises mixed together. How did you work with your sound designer to achieve this effect?

BENNANI: The Foley and sound design were done by Taul Katz, our friend and composer who did an amazing job. He and his team were recording everything with a Zoom recorder, but they weren’t in Morocco when we shot on location. So we ended up doing a mix of things. Everywhere we went, our friend Kamal, who was the Production Assistant on the shoot, would record every sound. Afterward, during the editing process, when we needed additional elements that we didn’t capture when we were in Morocco, we would ask Kamal to just go and film the busy main streets and to record people chatting in the background. We also used materials from iPhone videos because I had so many of them. 

BARKI: This also reminds me of the scene where Bouchra wakes up in the morning at Lamia’s house. When we were staying in Morocco, there was this guy who would pass outside our window every morning. He was selling secondhand electronics, like toasters. And he has a specific call...

BENNANI: Wait, this is something that everyone knows in Morocco. It’s famously crazy the way street vendors say it, this kind of scream, but it just means “sell.”

BARKI: So when we were in Morocco, I stood outside the window and I recorded his call. I thought it would work really well for the scene where she’s waking up and the atmosphere feels so familiar and so Casablanca. What’s interesting about these types of moments is that you’re building all these textures, but not everyone will necessarily get the context. As Meriem was saying, this is something that everybody knows in Morocco. For instance, if you heard, “Ding dong. Stand clear of the closing doors,” everybody would know that this was set in New York.

BENNANI: Everybody in the world would know.

BARKI: Yeah, exactly, because New York is so documented, and Morocco isn’t in that sense. As an outsider director, I always asked myself how much we needed to give context and how much we needed to let things just be. We didn’t want to make a film that explains someone’s experience for foreigners. We wanted to make a story that just feels like life. Some of the details are going to get lost for certain audiences, and some of the details are going to really shine. It’s been really interesting showing the film in different countries, and seeing how people pick up on different things. There are these small details, such as the sound of things. But then there are also the bigger details of going through a specific experience, how it feels to have these conversations with your parents within this cultural context.

BENNANI: Definitely. And to pick up from Orian’s example of the street vendor’s cry, there are many wonderful directors in Morocco who make films with a local audience in mind, but there are also films where it seems that they don’t care. I’ve read about these famous Moroccan films, where the lead actor is Palestinian. He’s a great actor, but he doesn’t have a Moroccan accent. He has a different Arabic accent. The fact that he was cast for a main role means that it’s not made for Moroccans. People from the outside won’t see the difference, but for us Arabs, it is as if you had a British person with a British accent playing a New Yorker. It’s crazy. So it became important to put in some details that are only legible to Moroccans or to people who have been to Morocco.

BARKI: We talked about it a lot. My biggest nightmare is that people will watch this movie in France or in Europe and say, “Oh, it’s so hard to be gay in Morocco.” It goes back to that question of how much context we provide about, for example, lesbian culture. There’s a scene where Bouchra meets Lamia and they’re about to hook up. We have a close up of her taking off her rings and putting them on the table. Every lesbian understands exactly what it means in terms of lesbian sex. The moment is a wink, but it’s definitely not something that we’re going to explain for someone who wouldn’t think about it.

MUBI: What you just said really resonates with me because what the film does so well is to move beyond this binary of New York versus Casablanca, or modernity versus tradition. It just embraces what life is. This is what life is like for someone who lives between cultures. I see that in the music, too, and the juxtaposition between modern Arabic songs on the radio and the harmonies sung by Bouchra’s mother and aunties. 

BENNANI: Because the film is a collage of our lived experiences, we just let these elements gradually emerge. We talked a lot about which songs to use, but it was natural to select these tracks, simply because I like them. There’s actually more Algerian than Moroccan music, which I’ve been super into. We worked with Flavien Berger for the score. We knew that the soundtrack would feature these grime songs, so the score didn’t need to be from one geographical place. Flavien is French. He lives in Belgium. He brought the kind of saxophone sound that you associate with New York cityscapes, but it was also a reference to film noir. We also wanted something with real instruments and a classic feeling, because the film is in 3D and very digital. So we needed to bring a feeling of warmth and texture, like grain, to the music.

BARKI: For the scene with the aunties singing and clapping, we had a video shot by Meriem when she visited home. It captured her aunties in the living room, doing literally that. We thought it was a beautiful image that would be fun to recreate with all these wolves. A lot of our brainstorming sounds just like that. From this image, we were thinking of ways to develop a thread of the story arc. This is a moment where she’s sitting literally in the middle of her entire family. How can we surface a moment of secrecy, where she’s talking about her life without sharing certain things?

BENNANI: Even before Orian tied this scene into the story, we thought it would be amazing to recreate this, just for pleasure. When we recorded the actors in Casablanca, I asked my mom and my aunt to be there, because they’re great actresses, and this is what they do with their cousins anyway. When Dounia Berrada, the actress who plays Aicha in the meta portion of the film, came to the studio, my mom and my aunt taught her how to do the song. Dounia, however, didn’t have a sense of rhythm. She wasn’t a natural singer either. She was trying really hard, which was so cute because my mom, who grew up singing, was getting impatient. She was like, How are you not able to do this? As Orian documented this moment, we found it so funny because my mom, who already knew the subject of the film, was feeling a bit of discomfort. Yet she was completely owning that set. In some of the mixes, she was the loudest in the room. When we first put the film together, we didn’t have that final scene of the rehearsal. When we looked through the footage, we realized that there are so many layers here. So we made an edit of the behind-the-scenes sequence, and we were like, Oh my God, this is the end of the film!

MUBI: It’s a beautiful film about the act of storytelling itself. For Bouchra, the process of writing a film feels generative. On the other hand, when talking to her family, she is forced to remove things from the story of her life, and that’s very painful.

BARKI: Yes, and in terms of storytelling, the biggest challenge was to create a story that is engaging and exciting without having a protagonist and a villain. Can we have tension that is engaging enough without it stemming from an obvious conflict between good and bad? Meriem, could you reference the essay that we discussed because I don’t remember it as well?

BENNANI: So the essay is by Ursula K. Le Guin, the famous sci-fi writer, and it’s called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In discussing the process of writing a story, Le Guin compares the gatherer with the hunter. When humans began to settle and farm, they no longer needed to go hunting. Then, out of boredom, people—mostly men—went hunting. This forms the basis of the hero story, which is very masculine and moves in one direction. It’s easier to make a good story out of that. She contrasts that with the gatherers, who simply  accumulate things in their bags. What’s the story there? How do you make that interesting? That was more her approach to building a story, which is much harder.

This is a very meta film. It really is a documentary. We didn’t start by trying to write a story with a structure and then populating it with scenes. We were experiencing things, and then we looked back at everything and tried to make sense of it in a way that has a beginning and an end, which life doesn’t. But we still had to tie it up. Originally, the beginning of the film didn’t have the meta layer of the phone conversations. It was just a story within a story. It was only one year into the production that we found we needed something more. Then, I talked to my mom on the phone and had these conversations that, when we heard them, we thought, Okay, this is the film for us. My mom gave me permission to use them as long as we replaced her voice. Then, the film became about a director talking to her mom. 

MUBI: There’s a multilingual dimension to the film, which is really astute. There’s this great line spoken by Bouchra. She said that she has never slept with someone in her first language, and that you express love and experience love in different ways, from language to language. 

BENNANI: It was really important for us to capture the affect of each language versus just translating dialogue into multiple languages. Each language is a different part of her heart, and how she relates to the world. They also have their own humor. For the Moroccan Arabic dialogue, Ayla wrote a lot of that, but when we recorded it with people who were playing themselves, they were improvising with their own way of speaking. The same goes for the French and English portions, which have improvisations that capture how people really speak. When we have screenings in the US or London versus in France, people laugh more at the English jokes than at the French jokes. I was like, Oh no, maybe they’re not properly translated. But actually, it’s a good thing. For instance, the banter between Orian’s character and Bouchra, my character, belongs to a certain moment in time, spoken by New Yorkers of a certain age. And that’s okay. Specificity is important for us.

BARKI: The line that you referenced really encapsulates this feeling of being an immigrant living between two cultures and the split that becomes your existence. A split sounds like such a violent thing, but this state has become your specific experience, and it will be forever. Certain things will only feel like home at home, and certain things will only feel like home in your new home. The mix of both is who you become, and that is something that really resonates with people who are immigrants, no matter where they come from. You have your family—your biological family—and you have another family of friends. And each family will never be able to understand your life fully, and it’s a common thing, even if you don’t immigrate to a completely different culture.

BENNANI: I also think that, if you move somewhere and then you produce a life that looks very much like the life you had as a kid or that of your parents, then there’s more understanding. But for queer people or people who are adjacent to queer circles, they’re able to value friendship in a way that’s as important as family.

MUBI: Your film has a lot of amazing fashion moments, and my last question has to do with a specific costume choice. One of my favorite items is the handbag carried by the real Aicha, which has what looks like newspaper print on it. I’m curious about how you came up with these outfit details because they are very character-specific.

BENNANI: The costume department was led by Becky Akinyode, who’s an amazing stylist and one of our close friends. For Bouchra, she pulled a lot of Prada and Miu Miu items because the film was financed by Fondazione Prada. We loved it, and it also makes sense for some of the characters. For others, the approach was not to make them fashionable. We wanted to build a character, not someone who dresses cool. A lot of the time, we based the costumes off the real people that inspired a character. The specific bag that you're talking about actually has a print that I made based on the letter that Bouchra sends to her mother. It’s a full print with USPS logos and stamps. It’s a little foreshadowing of what’s gonna happen.

BARKI: That’s cool. We never talked about that. No one ever asked about that specifically.

BENNANI: The thing is, in cinema, but specifically in animation, we have to think about every single thing that you see on screen. Then you start being so intentional that sometimes you have to stop yourself. At this moment, we needed a print. What is it gonna be? We had just designed the letter, and so we had the images. And there you go.