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I was loyal to the series for subsequent years until relocating from California to Idaho. It’s a rare if not nonexistent opportunity to view an African film in Boise, Idaho. Thus, I am deeply grateful to Kathryn MacKay and A.J. Fox for granting me remote access to the program this year.
The 2025 National Traveling Series features films selected from the 2024 New York African Film Festival, which was presented under the theme “Convergence of Time.” This lineup invited audiences to explore the boundless realms of African and diaspora storytelling—celebrating its visionary, thought-provoking, and fearless spirit. I’ll touch first on the upcoming screening of Bouchra and work my way back through the series.
As synopsized by PFA: “Set between New York, Rabat, and Casablanca, in a world populated by anthropomorphic animals and suspended between realism, autobiography, and fiction, this artwork, the culmination of a long creative process, blends documentary and 3D animation languages. The film follows Bouchra, a thirty-five-year-old Moroccan jackal and filmmaker living in New York, as she writes an autobiographical film exploring how her queerness has impacted her mother, Aicha, a cardiologist jackal living in Casablanca. The story blends fiction—Bouchra’s film within the film—with an adaptation of recorded nonfiction conversations between Meriem Bennani and her mother.”
Over the years in looking at films—particularly foreign genre films—I’ve noticed that some qualities (like humor) don’t travel well. What’s funny in Africa might not induce laughter in the U.S. The same applies to animation. U.S. cinema is notoriously rife with anthropomorphized animal characters, usually painted by number with a broad brush, lots of slapstick, wisecracking, and so cute they often hurt. By contrast, Barki and Bennani’s debut feature Bouchra eschews the clownish stereotype of talking animals in formulaic scenarios and delivers a thoroughly unique and stylish examination of a lesbian jackal filmmaker coming to terms with her mother’s prudish response to her coming out and the complicated effort to resolve their attitudes. The dialogue boasts naturalistic and culturally specific cadence and conversational flow. The film is also admirably erotic.
Bouchra is less a coming-out film as it is a having come out film. It’s significant enough to come out to a parent but then to weather the response takes the experience to another level. When I first came out to my mother, for example, she blamed my sister who calmly reprimanded her and reminded her that it wasn’t anybody’s fault for who I was. Freed from responsibility, my mother then took the next step, which was to ask me to hide my sexuality from the relatives and to never mention it. She was concerned they would not understand, convinced they would be intolerant, and feared it would all reflect back on her (and then she wondered years later why I abandoned family visits where I could never be myself).
The years tempered the experience of coming out to her and shortly before her death I mentioned to her that I was probably going to marry my partner of thirty years. She was quiet for a moment and then said, “If you want me to, I will be happy to give you away at the wedding.” I found it sweet and sad that she could only perceive a gay wedding as hetero-imitative and that somehow I had to be the bride. She died before my wedding and I gave myself away.
In this examination of the familial wake that follows the honest affirmation of one’s identity, Bouchra is charmingly sophisticated, as is the photorealistic animation technique of a mixing live-action footage with 3D imaging, providing a palpable sense of urbanity; neon gleaming in the rain. I was reminded of Laura Nyro’s New York lyric: “Where is the night luster? Past my trials.”
As value added to Bouchra finishing up the African Film Festival, the Berkeley Art Museum is featuring a crossover exhibition “Life on the CAPS” spotlighting Meriem Bennani’s multidisciplinary practices (May 6, 2026 through August 23, 2026). “Fueled by the accelerating ubiquity of technology and visual culture,” they write, “Bennani’s approach to video is a layered amalgamation of visual languages spanning documentary, social media, cartoons, and reality television. Through this composite visuality, Bennani constructs fictitious worlds that expose the dynamics of power that persist in the postcolonial histories of Morocco and the wider African continent.”
This exhibition is the California debut of Bennani’s acclaimed video trilogy “Life on the CAPS” (2018–22). Set in a dystopian future, the series takes place in the CAPS, a fictional island where migrants are interned after teleporting “illegally” across borders. The videos themselves mirror the liminal status of the CAPS residents, rendered with layers...
