Films in shooting or post-production
BARDI
Synopsis
A fraternity of horse-riders travels across a Central Moroccan landscape of Saints’ shrines and wheat fields, of ancient cities and hidden rural communities, to participate in the ancient equestrian ritual of Tbourida. This is a story of fraternal bonds, of community, belief, and of the transformative powers of performance. Fiction and reality become one: the farmer becomes a general, the young man becomes a brave prince, the metal worker becomes a hero. Bardi is a choral film, sung by different men and boys. It is an ode to a different kind of community, a closed world of transmission and belief, where the forging of the self is played out in a theater of horses and of men.
Tala Hadid
Tala Hadid
Louverture Films (USA)
Joslyn Barnes
K Films (Morocco)
Khadija Alami
Ciné-Sud Promotion (France)
Thierry Lenouvel
Director’s statement
I am a photographer and director working on the porous border between fiction and non-fiction cinema. Each film is thus a kind of wager, always uncertain, where one wrestles in the encounter with the technical, with bodies, with landscapes, with the visible and the invisible, and of course with time, but it is precisely here, on this line of indeterminacy, that new spaces and ways of story-telling can emerge. In Bardi the cards are placed on the table - the road ahead only partially revealed, through the thin membrane between fiction and world - the gamble is placed at the heart of story-telling. As we enter, through the frame, into this world of men, the goal is to trace lines between those in front, behind and beyond the lens. To create, via the co-construction of a cinematographic map, connections that open up shared spaces of imagination and fabulation.
Biographies
Tala Hadid is a photographer and filmmaker. Her films have received numerous awards and screened at festivals around the world, including Berlin and Venice and, among other venues, at the MoMA and Lincoln Center NYC, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, La Cinémathèque Française, and the Photographer’s Gallery in London. Hadid’s work is part of the Ruben Bentsov Moving Image Collection at the Walker Museum in the US. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Abdelmonime El Jarib, screenwriter and dialogue writer, was born in Casablanca in 1972. A law graduate, he joined the Socialist Party in his youth. He began working in production on films such as Once Upon a Time in the Oued by Djemel Bensalah, Ridley Scott's Gladiator, Blackhawk Down and Spy Game, among others. He has worked on several films as a dialogue writer, including Leila Marrakchi's Marock, Tala Hadid's The Narrow Frame of Midnight, and most recently, Ismael Iraki's award-winning Venice Film Festival film Zanka Contact. He also wrote and directed the award-winning short Bonne Correction.
