Fez — Meriem Bennani’s strange, intimate world of animated animals, mothers, migration, and New York life is heading outdoors this weekend.

The Rabat-born, New York-based artist will present “Bouchra,” the animated feature she co-directed with Orian Barki, at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens on September 12.

The park announced that the free evening will run from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EST as part of the return of its long-running “Outdoor Cinema” program.

Between Casablanca and New York

“Bouchra” follows a 35-year-old Moroccan filmmaker living in New York who happens to be depicted as a coyote.

Struggling to begin a new project, she starts a long-distance conversation with her mother, Aicha, in Casablanca. Their exchanges reopen memories connected to family, relationships, sexuality, love, and life between cultures.

MUBI describes the film as a story about a New York-based Moroccan filmmaker using her own life as material while confronting her past through conversations with her mother.

The project carries an autobiographical dimension. Bennani has frequently built her work around the distance between Morocco and New York, using humor, digital imagery, and exaggerated fictional worlds to examine migration and belonging.

“Bouchra” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025 before screening at festivals including the New York Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, and Chéries-Chéris. Barki’s official filmography documents several awards collected by the film across its festival run.

A Moroccan night in Queens

The September 12 screening will extend beyond the film itself.

Socrates Sculpture Park confirmed that the evening will include a DJ set by Bergsonist and Moroccan food from Amazigh Food Truck.

That context feels particularly fitting for a movie built around cultural distance. “Bouchra” moves constantly between New York and Casablanca, but its Queens screening will allow those worlds to briefly occupy the same physical space.

For Bennani, whose work has long treated diaspora as something complicated, funny, awkward, and deeply personal, the event brings a Moroccan story about New York directly into one of the city’s most culturally diverse boroughs.

Rather than presenting identity as something neatly divided between two countries, “Bouchra” suggests that both places can exist at once, sometimes inside the same conversation with your mother.