Women Make Waves International Film Festival 2026

A Morocco-born artist lives and works in New York. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations widely shown in numerous solo exhibitions and retrospectives around the world, notably been presented at the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, the Guggenheim Museum, Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Nottingham Contemporary, Renaissance Society in Chicago and Kamel Lazaar Foundation in Tunis. Often referencing globalized popular culture and the fractured states of modern society, Bennani’s films address the complexity of identities and the issues related to gender, exile, migration, community and the omnipresence of digital technologies. She weaves together humor and critique to explore the political force of collective life, while highlighting the power dynamics that shape our hyper-connected societies. Her works shift easily from music videos to animation, via found footage or documentary material, subverting dominant narratives and opening them up to new, often idiosyncratic and absurdist forms of storytelling. In this special focus program, we pair Bouchra with 2 Lizards, the micro-series that marks Bennani’s first directorial collaboration with Orian Barki, along with Life on the CAPS – Trilogy, her acclaimed three-part worldbuilding series, as a way to take glimpse into the playful world of the artist and trace the trajectory of an artist in the lead up to Bennani’s latest and most personal filmic work, Bouchra.