There is nothing a large-scale international film festival does better than enables an audience to stretch their boundaries and watch the sorts of things they would never typically encounter in their day-to-day movie-going life. I am reminded of that fact while watching Bouchra, a 2025 animated feature directed by Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani. This Moroccan/American/Italian co-production follows a queer anthropomorphic jackal filmmaker in New York as she considers her latest project and reconnects over the telephone with her mother back in Africa. It is not exactly multiplex material.

Bouchra, like 2024’s animated sensation Flow, has been animated using the open-source 3D graphics software Blender. In a medium that is dominated by big-budget Hollywood studios, each running budgets in the hundreds of millions per film, this leaves Bouchra looking extremely limited in terms of visual motion and texture. It is not simply that its characters and backgrounds lack detail: the movement of those characters is relatively crude and distracting, and individual angles seem to have been selected more for how they will remove the need for extensive animation than how each shot will look in the finished film.

At the same time the narrative is a relatively simple affair, dominated by conversations over the telephone and sitting around in apartments and nightclubs. There is not a huge amount to animate because there simply is not a great deal that is going on. Characters are uniformly envisaged as anthropomorphic: human bodies, but animal heads. There does not seem a pressing need to undertake such representations, although it does appear to effectively represent racial differences in a manner other than skin colour.

This is typically the point where one would write off Bouchra as a poor quality exercise, or even question why such a limited production has been gifted a slot in a major film festival. There is a strange, distinctive vibe that runs through the piece. It defies the film’s general limitations and makes it oddly difficult to ignore. For one thing it is surprisingly sexual for a film about animals artists in New York. In one key moment, two characters kiss each other passionately. When their mouths break, a long train of saliva trails between them. The camera tracks in on this line of spit, lingering thoughtfully. It is a bizarre moment and an odd shot, yet that one shot sticks in the mind. It keeps re-emerging in one’s thoughts after the fact.

It is not the only striking moment. Bouchra is filled with them: small incidental details that dominate one’s attention, puncturing the otherwise fairly banal sheen of the piece as a whole and revealing a distinctive, weirdly effective work struggling valiantly against its miniscule budget. There is clearly a genuine human story at the film’s core, and an informed reflection of the immigrant experience in a very personal fashion. It just happens to also be told with lesbian jackal sex.

This is the sort of experimental, idiosyncratic work for which film festivals were built. Far from an unqualified success, Bouchra is one of the most interesting efforts I have seen of late. Your film-viewing diet will be healthier for having given it a chance.