Cheap Movie Tuesday: Bouchra (2026)

It’s Cheap Movie Tuesday! And today’s cheap movie, Bouchra, is brought to you by the very expensive clothing store, Prada.

More specifically, it was funded by Fondazione Prada, the fashion empire’s institution dedicated to contemporary art and culture. Prada provided funding and also the wardrobe for most of the cast, which might seem odd considering Bouchra is an animated film. I’ll get back to that.

Bouchra is the name of the movie’s protagonist, a lesbian filmmaker living in NYC, trying to make a movie about the process of coming out to her family who live in Morocco.

The action moves back and forth between Brooklyn and Casablanca and also back and forth between “the movie” Bouchra is making and her actual coming out experience.

This film does a great job capturing the tension of lives communicated largely through text, social media updates and occasional phone conversations.

Bouchra desperately wants to be honest with her family, but has to juggle that and the movie she’s trying to make along with the stress of paying rent and staying alive in New York City. No easy task. It’s completely understandable that she watches slop like Is it Cake? as a pain killer. It’s probably less harmful than prescription pills and definitely less expensive.

Bouchra is is the semi-autobiographical story of Meriem Bennani, who co-wrote, co-directed and provides Bouchra’s voice. The many phone conversations between Bouchra and her mother are real, the mother’s dialogue is dubbed over by actress Yto Barrada.

The gorgeous animation depicts a low-lit gothic version of New York City’s skyscrapers and Casablanca’s Art Deco boulevards. All of this movie is animated with Blender, the free and open source 3D computer graphics software that has been used to create many extraordinary films, notably Flow, which won the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2024.

Bennani and co-director Orian Barki originally made a series of online short films1 with Blender called 2 Lizards, about life during the pandemic. These quickly became very popular and soon they were approached about making a Blender feature.

Blender might be free but it is not easy to work with, it often involves merging animation with live action footage, which is how those Prada clothes wound up in the movie. When Bennani and Barki decided to make a feature with Blender they knew they would need a larger team and reached out to animator, John Michael Boling.

Boling was initially unreceptive. The stress of animating films had become so intense for him he’d recently given up and become a sheep farmer, but Bouchra was such an intriguing proposal he decided to come out of retirement.

Part of the challenge animating Bouchra is that all characters are anthropomorphic animals. Bouchra herself, is a jackal, a creature native to Morocco and one Bennani felt accurately portrayed both the vulnerability and the savage resilience of the lead character.

Bennani has declined to comment on the symbolism behind the other animals, but Boling has revealed that many were represented as amphibians and reptiles because those animals don’t have hair. Hair is brutally hard to animate.

Bouchra is one of the most unique films of 2026 and worth the effort to track down.

The Tea: At a pivotal scene in Bouchra, the characters decide to risk drinking tea which is several years old. If you want to do that safely, your best bet is Pu’er tea, a fermented dark tea from the Yunnan province in China. It’s taste is often described as ‘astringent’ but it’s good for digestion and keeps for decades.

The Snack: Cake of course. A ridiculous cake designed to stump all of the celebrity guessers on “Is It Cake?” Cake that looks like a slice of pie, perhaps?