The Currents section of this year’s New York Film Festival will include the world premiere of Bardi by filmmaker and photographer Tala Hadid.
Festival organizer Film at Lincoln Center said Thursday the Currents lineup will have15 feature films, five of which will be making their world premieres, along with one restoration world premiere and 28 shorts.
The festival will run from September 25 through October 12.
The Currents section, according to today’s announcement, “presents films that expand the possibilities of the form, reminding us that contemporary cinema is an ever-evolving terrain.”
Bardi explores the world of a group of horse-riders in central Morocco. It follows an equestrian military ritual called Tbourida, which dates to the 16th century.
Other world premieres include Heil Jupiter!, from Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose Silent Light played at New York and a number of other global festivals in 2006; and Hong Kong–born artist Tiffany Sia’s Overt Listening, which addresses the Cold War legacy of China and Taiwan.
For the Moon is Éric Baudelaire’s improvisatory collaboration with kids at the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, while Dan Sallitt’s What Can’t Be Mentioned catches up with characters from Sallitt’s acclaimed The Unspeakable Act.
The festival will also showcase, in a selection of both the Currents and Revivals sections, the world premiere of a new restoration of Suicide Note by critic and artist Fred Camper. It is described as “a diaristic work shot largely in New York in the late 1970s and shown only a handful of times since, and designed to be slightly different at each screening thanks to a simple chance operation.”
Other Currents features, as described by festival programmers, include British experimental filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s “shapeshifting, feminist meditation” At Night; Sebastian Brameshuber’s London, about a driver connecting with ride sharers on the Westautobahn between Vienna and Salzburg; Red Rocks by Bruno Dumont, “who uses an observational approach to tell a fanciful story of young children in a French Riviera town”; The Remotes, Manila-based John Torres’s “strikingly original neo-noir that combines sci-fi and documentary”; and Luise Donschen’s Tomorrow a Long Time Ago, “a lightly supernatural tale of unemployment and social estrangement” during the 1990 reunification of Germany.
“The Currents lineup pushes against the conventions of cinematic form, putting into relief the standardization that dominates the film landscape,” said Dennis Lim, the fest’s artistic director, in the lineup announcement. “This year’s selection is especially thrilling in its scope and diversity, encompassing multiple modes of production and possibilities for film language, and visions that range from the dynamically intimate to the genuinely — sometimes literally — cosmic.”
