There is a certain expectation that comes with a film’s selection for the Currents section of the New York Film Festival, not least because the festival presents the assorted titles as “films that expand the possibilities of the form, reminding us that contemporary cinema is an ever-evolving terrain.” In many cases, such cachet can act as a validator, but for Bardi, the centerpiece of this year’s Currents and the second entry in Tala Hadid’s projected trilogy, it proves to be a weighty burden. After House in the Fields, which followed two sisters and their Amazigh community in the Moroccan High Atlas Mountains, Bardi — the word derives from the gunpowder used in the equestrian Tbourida ritual and is nowadays used to designate the eponymous horsemen — centers on two brothers and their fraternal community of horse riders traveling across central Morocco. Thus working, at least pro forma, in the ethnographic tradition, Hadid, who spent three years among the horse-riding fraternity, chooses neither Rouchian meta-reflexivity nor the immersive style of the Sensory Ethnography Lab and its disciples, but rather a docu-drama hybrid form that supplies a few of her protagonists with voiceover narration. It is one of many regrettable choices in a film so eager to honor its subjects that it suppresses its own curiosity.
Let us step back for a moment and remember one of the key distinctions David MacDougall, following the tradition of Bill Nichols, drew between fiction film and documentary. There is, MacDougall posited, “a fundamental difference between films about living people, who belong to the world regardless of any film that might be made about them, and people imagined by a scriptwriter and played by actors. There is far more to the person in documentary than what one films, but there is no more to a fictional character than what is in the film, however richly it is evoked.” A voiceover — an addition and superimposition of speech onto an already shot scene — holds the potential to destabilize such stringent conceptions. It can intensify the interiority that is otherwise to be inferred from and projected onto a person’s countenance, their gesture, their action. And it can heighten the audience’s awareness of a film’s constructedness by splitting up the temporalities of the video and audio tracks, e.g., through a commentary on what is depicted.
In Hadid’s Bardi, however, the voiceover — performed mostly with the gravity of a whisper — is used merely to supply generic and artificial comments. When the viewer hears the chief horse rider, the moqaddem, think: “The boys are like my sons” or “So many people under my responsibility, no time to rest,” it is difficult to imagine him thinking this without an audience in mind. His daughter later sends him an equally improbable telepathic message: “God bless you, I am proud of you, you are a fantastic bardi.” At another moment in the film, this relationship seems to be on the verge of renegotiation, when the teenage girl announces her wish to become a horse rider herself. But as her father declares the equestrian practice of the centuries-old Tbourida martial ritual to be exclusive to males — “Riding is war. It’s jihad” — the subject is dropped without further friction. The scene is hyper-stylized, featuring an impossible shot-reverse-shot succession that may point toward the mere performativity of patriarchal masculinity. Even if that were so, there is little tension — let alone critique — to Hadid’s portraiture. Going back to MacDougall and his makeshift definition, one feels impelled to ask what the point is of voiceover narration and dialogue that, rather than pointing outside the realm of fiction, seem to suggest that there is in fact no more to the people you see on the screen; that their actions and overall outwardness are a lossless representation of their being.
Perhaps matters would stand better if at least the visual level took into account the complexities of performance that are central to any given ritual. Alas, several of the human interactions appear so openly staged that they inadvertently diminish the potential for ambiguity, which is all the more baffling considering the director’s express wish, stated in the press notes, “to allow the viewer to move through the film without always knowing whether a moment had been observed, invited or invented.” The fact that the presence of Hadid and her camera remains virtually unacknowledged in the particularly performative scenes only compounds the problem. The camera, for the most part, inhabits a privileged — at times superhuman — position favoring center stage rather than peripheral perspectives. Mid-shots and close-ups are customarily captured with the kind of autofocus one finds in contemporary smartphone cameras, which yields occasional glitches of recalibration. For someone as deeply invested in the instability of the digital image as, say, Radu Jude — think of the compressed EarthCam footage in Sleep #2 or the iPhone-shot Kontinental ’25 — such aesthetics may do. But for a film purportedly concerned with the exploration of and immersion into a community little known to many in its audience, it seems a strange choice to constantly blur the backgrounds and thus isolate the protagonists from their environments. Rather than expanding the possibilities of the form, such choices merely reproduce the predominant images of YouTube and social media.
The scenes that stand out, unsurprisingly, are those committed to capturing the texture of the horsemen’s life: a horse’s hoof to be filed, a wound to be tended, the sharing of a large tagine dish, a biker providing a spectacle as he circles through a quasi-globe of death. Even the several drone shots — initially tracing the waves of the Atlantic coastline before later hovering over the vast campsites — add to the viewer’s sense of scope. And yet, until the end, the narrative structure remains clumsy at best. Perhaps the most jarring among Hadid’s decisions is the evocation of the 2023 Al Haouz earthquake that awaits the viewer near the end, a catastrophe that took more than 2,900 lives and caused a national trauma. Given the little time that is spent on the subject, its inclusion feels anything but organic. Eventually, as the film, in desperate search of a bookend, shifts to a scene that echoes its very beginning, featuring the two brothers and their horse, one is left wondering if a conventional form might not have better suited such conventional longings for closure.
Published as part of NYFF 2026 — Dispatch 6.
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