Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki are a collaborative artist duo known for their innovative animated films, particularly the viral COVID-19 series 2 Lizards, blending documentary, animation, and digital culture to explore questions of identity, society, and connection. Their feature debut, Bouchra, builds upon their unique blend to explore the relationship between a queer Moroccan Coyote and her mother. The project began as a fictional story about a Moroccan mother and daughter separated by distance and sexual orientation, loosely inspired by Bennani’s experiences. The filmmakers had written an iteration, even recorded the voices and began animating before deciding that “something was missing.” Then Bennani began recording real conversations with her mother, initially as research. The recordings turned out to be better than anything they had written. With her mother’s permission, she used them as the film’s spine, re-creating the dialogue through animation. Blending live-action, photogrammetry and 3D scanning, the finished film moves between Casablanca, Rabat and New York, as well as between fiction and autobiography. It is a portrait of love, communication, and of the gaps that open when language crosses oceans.
“I guess you could say that one of my strategies to avoid exoticising my subjects, is to not care about this directly. I think this is an issue that only comes up if it is self-conscious. Self-consciousness is always in relation to something; trying to understand where you position yourself. In this case, it would be in relation to the West, or in relation to Morocco. At this point, I think that every artist who comes from somewhere and works elsewhere, is in a constant identity crisis. I’ve had it forever and I’m used to it now, but I think it’s paralyzing to always make work from that crisis. It’s always going to be there anyway.”
