A Sovereign Surface: Jackals, Pixels, and the Right to Opacity

In an essay by Fatoumata Bah, MUBI's film publication Notebook explores "Bouchra" (2025), directed by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki: a film that moves between New York and Casablanca, tracing a young Moroccan filmmaker's life in the space between self-knowledge, family, migration, and language. "Bouchra" is neither a conventional documentary nor a standard biographical drama; it draws on 3D animation, phone calls, multiple languages, and a world of animal figures to build an experience at once deeply personal and resistant to full confession. In Bah's reading, the jackal face of Bennani's character, the acclaimed Moroccan artist who appears in the film in this form, is no mere fantasy flourish. She sees it as a way of preserving the "right to opacity," a concept from the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant that stands against the Western gaze's desire to render the migrant subject fully transparent. The jackal, a creature of North African landscapes and oral storytelling that lives on thresholds, close to home yet never domesticated, lets the character be seen, speak, and show feeling while refusing to become an object of consumption. The film's digital surface thus becomes a form of protection: a sovereign skin granting closeness and distance at once. Bah also reads the film through Hamid Naficy's idea of "accented cinema," the cinema of exile, migration, and diaspora whose structures are shaped by letters, phone calls, plural languages, and movement between home and elsewhere. In "Bouchra," that accent resides in the software and the digital image itself. Shifting among Darija (Moroccan Arabic), French, and English, the film shows that intimacy is not only emotional closeness but is also made of language, translation, and the difficulty of speaking one's heart in the language of home, until the subtitles become a map of displacement. The essay closes by stressing that "Bouchra" seeks neither full confession nor final reconciliation. The mother-daughter bond takes shape through silences, phone calls, the memory of an old letter, and sentences never finished. To live in diaspora, the film suggests, is to live in ongoing translation; and in the gap between the original and the translation, between home and distance, between revealing and remaining hidden, another way of loving becomes possible.

Read the full story at MUBI Notebook →