Screening: Bardi with Tala Hadid in Person
October 6 @ 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Please join the Film Study Center, in collaboration with the Sensory Ethnography Lab, for a special screening and conversation with Tala Hadid and her new film Bardi, which is premiering at the New York Film Festival.
Filmmaker and photographer Tala Hadid immersed herself in the rugged, fraternal world of a group of horse-riders in central Morocco for this visually rapturous work that merges portraiture and fabulation. With thrilling camerawork, Hadid accompanies the men as they take part in Tbourida, an equestrian military ritual that dates to the 16th century and allows them to transform into new personas. As the itinerant group rides across the country, Hadid captures with a mix of intimacy and epic grandeur their geographically expansive yet emotionally enclosed universe, with its codes of behavior and fully embodied performances of masculinity. Hadid, whose previous films include the short Your Dark Hair Ihsan (NYFF43) and the feature House in the Fields, about the Amazigh of Morocco, is fascinated with how people within communities encounter tradition, myth, and the self; Bardi is a majestic work of earthy imagination that transcends time and landscape. – New York Film Festival
Tala Hadid is a photographer and filmmaker and made her first feature documentary film, Sacred Poet, on the italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Her films have screened at film festivals around the world, including Berlin and Venice and shown, among other venues, at the MoMA and Lincoln Center in NYC, The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, La Cinémathèque Française in Paris, the Smithsonian Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C, the Los Angeles County Museum and the Photographer’s Gallery in London. Her films have received numerous awards, including a student Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2013, the Fine Art photography publisher Stern published a volume of a selection of Hadid’s photographs from her project Heterotopia as part of its Stern Fotografie Portfolio series of emerging photographers. In 2014, Hadid completed work on Itarr el Layl. The award-winning film premiered at the Toronto film Festival and went on to screen at numerous film festivals and venues around the world, including the Lincoln Center in New York, the Rome Film Festival, and the London Film Festival. In 2017, Hadid’s project House in the Fields was an official selection at the Berlin Film Festival where it was nominated for the Glashütte Original Documentary Award. The film was also the recipient, among other prizes, of the Commune di Milano prize for best feature film at the 2017 FCAAL Milano Film Festival, the Prize for Best Documentary film at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the Fiction/Non Fiction award at Millennium Docs against Gravity in Warsaw, the 2M Grand Prize at FIDADOC 2017, the 2017 John Marshall Award in the US, the Special Jury Prize at the 2018 National Film Festival in Tangiers, and the Grand Prize of the city at the 2018 International Mediterranean Film Festival of Tetouan. In 2019 Hadid worked on a permanent video installation at the Qatar National Museum by architect Jean Nouvel. In the same year she participated in the 2019 Rabat Biennale with her installation entitled Floodplain. In 2025 and 2026 Hadid served as a visiting faculty member in the department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Her photo and video installation Sphere, created in collaboration with choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen, will premiere at the Menagerie de Verre as part of the Festival d’Automne in Paris in winter 2026. Her new feature film, Bardi, is forthcoming. Hadid’s work is included in the Ruben Bentsov Moving Image Collection at the Walker Museum. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
image: still from Bardi