Bouchra follows a queer Moroccan jackal in New York whose stalled first film starts moving the moment she finally picks up the phone and calls her mother in Casablanca. Co-directed by Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, this 2026 comedy-drama runs a compact eighty-three minutes.
What is Bouchra about?
The title character has a film to make and no way into it. Living in New York as a working artist, Bouchra is stuck on page one, and the blank screen is only part of the problem. Money is thin, her sense of where she belongs is split between two continents, and her romantic life is a series of open questions rather than a single answer. What breaks the deadlock is the thing she has been avoiding: a string of long, awkward, overdue phone conversations with her mother back in Casablanca. Each call is uncomfortable, and each one leaks into the project she is supposedly writing, until the conversations and the film become hard to separate. The result is a story about an artist learning that the material she needs has been waiting on the other end of the line all along.
About the cast
Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki direct and also appear in the cast, alongside Fayçal Azizi, Ariana Faye Allensworth, Hassan Hamdani, Yto Barrada, Dounia Berrada and Bouchra Benzekri. The ensemble mixes voices from Moroccan and American backgrounds, which suits a story that keeps one foot in each place.
Context & significance
Bouchra belongs to a growing wave of diaspora stories that treat the phone call home as a dramatic engine rather than a throwaway scene. The film is a United States and Italy co-production, and its blend of comedy and drama lets it move between the mundane precarity of freelance artistic work and the heavier questions of cultural identity without settling into either register for long. Its central figure being a jackal rather than a human gives the directors room to play with how an outsider sees a city and a family at the same time.
Watching Bouchra on Ktime
Bouchra is available to stream on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can choose whichever suits them. Reading this page is free; to watch the film you log in with a K-Time account. The interface is built around Farsi, which makes browsing and playback straightforward for the Iranian diaspora audience the service is designed for.