Socrates Sculpture Park is pleased to announce the return of Outdoor Cinema, the Park’s beloved summer film series. For more than two decades, Outdoor Cinema has brought neighbors together through film and shared cultural experiences, reflecting the rich diversity of Queens and the spirit of exchange and belonging at the heart of Socrates. This year, the series returns as a two-night pilot program, continuing a longstanding Park tradition while exploring a renewed approach to Outdoor Cinema for the years ahead.
This year’s program presents films exploring artists, communities, and cultural histories, complemented by food and live performance that connect audiences to the cultural contexts of each film. Each evening will feature New York City food vendors offering dishes connected to the communities and traditions represented on screen, alongside musicians and performers responding to the artists, histories, and creative traditions at the heart of each screening.
Outdoor Cinema opens with BOUCHRA, an animated film by artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki. Moving between Casablanca and New York, the film follows Bouchra, a Moroccan filmmaker living in New York, as she navigates a conversation with her mother and reflects on family, sexuality, love, and the complexities of living between cultures.
The evening begins with a special pre-screening DJ set by Moroccan-born, New York-based artist and composer, Bergsonist, followed by introductory remarks from Bennani and Barki. The evening’s food program will feature Moroccan cuisine, creating a culinary connection to the places, people, and traditions that shape the film.
About the Film
Wrestling with writer’s block for her first film, Bouchra, a queer Moroccan jackal living in NYC, starts having difficult yet overdue phone calls with her mother in Casablanca that begin influencing the project. Balancing the precarity of working as an artist in New York, the rift in her identity between her two homes and an array of friendships and romantic interests, Bouchra’s emotional reckoning with her mother and herself becomes her path to expression.
With a lived-in granularity and unmistakable visual style, BOUCHRA, the feature debut from acclaimed visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki (best known together from their 2020 web series 2 LIZARDS), is a singular portrait effortlessly towing the line between documentary, visual art and resonant family drama. Deeply felt, surprisingly sexy and formally adventurous, Bennani and Barki’s distinctive debut forges new ground that “will make it a classic of queer cinema for years to come” (Next Best Picture).
Click here to view the trailer.
About the Directors
Meriem Bennani was born in 1988, in Rabat, Morocco and today lives and works in New York City, New York. Bennani received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2012 after receiving her MFA in Animation from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France in 2011. Moving between the aesthetics of reality television, documentary, animation and more, Bennani’s videos and installations embrace play and the absurd, while contemplating the intricacies of human behavior.
Orian Barki is a New York-based filmmaker whose raw, character-driven documentaries have appeared on ESPN, PBS, Vogue, Nowness, The Fader and more. Her animated series 2 Lizards, co-directed with Meriem Bennani, entered the permanent collections of MoMA, MOCA and the Whitney. Their feature Bouchra premiered at TIFF in 2025 and won multiple awards, including the Grand Prix at Bordeaux and the Gold Q-Hugo at CIFF.
About the Performer
Selwa Abd, known as Bergsonist, is a Moroccan-born, New York-based multimedia artist and composer. Her interdisciplinary practice, spanning performance, sound, video, and installation, draws on electroacoustic and musique concrète traditions to explore postcolonial identity, techno-futurism, and the psychology of virtuality. She is also the founder of Pick Up The Flow, a resource for artists, and has been a resident DJ on NTS Radio since 2018.
About Rooftop Films
Rooftop Films transforms public spaces into dynamic cultural hubs, bringing vibrant film experiences to communities with limited access to the arts. By connecting the works of emerging filmmakers to wider audiences, we strengthen community bonds, spark meaningful dialogue, and amplify underrepresented voices that deserve to be heard. For more information visit their website.
Outdoor Cinema is made possible by the generosity of the Socrates Sculpture Park Ambassadors, Community Council, and hundreds of neighbors and supporters who believe in the power of art, culture, and shared public space to bring people together.