What does Bardi’s world premiere bring to the New York Film Festival?

Currents is NYFF’s home for formally exploratory cinema rather than a secondary version of the celebrity-driven Main Slate. Film at Lincoln Center defines it as an international survey of work that expands the possibilities of the medium. Naming Bardi as its Centerpiece therefore signals curatorial confidence in both Hadid’s visual approach and the film’s ability to anchor a programme spanning fiction, documentary, restoration and artists’ cinema.

The wider selection ranges from Beatrice Gibson’s nocturnal, feminist At Night and Ana Vaz’s Japan-focused Hanabi to Tiffany Sia’s Taiwan-set Overt Listening. It also includes Mariano Llinás’s 330-minute Life of Jorge Luis Borges, John Torres’s technology-inflected The Remotes and a new 4K restoration of Fred Camper’s Suicide Note. Several works will have their world premieres in New York, while others arrive after festival appearances elsewhere. The result is less a conventional showcase of coming theatrical releases than an argument about the many shapes a film can now take.

That identity has developed over successive editions. In 2025, Film at Lincoln Center presented 16 features and 24 shorts in Currents and emphasised techniques ranging from mobile-phone photography and analogue video to custom 3D rigs and deliberately deconstructed artificial-intelligence imagery. The 2026 programme continues that broad definition of cinema, pairing newly made features with different gauges, projection formats and restored work.

Bardi’s place at the centre is notable because its experimentation appears rooted in physical performance rather than technological novelty. Materials published by the Marrakech International Film Festival’s Atlas Ateliers describe it as a choral film in which farmers, metalworkers and young riders become generals, heroes and princes through Tbourida. That framing presents tradition as something enacted and continually remade, not as a static object preserved for outsiders.

There is no confirmed Belgian screening or distributor for Bardi at this stage, and Belgium is not listed among its production countries. Its Belgian relevance is consequently modest: this is primarily an international film-culture story, with a practical connection for residents who follow festival cinema or may travel to New York.

Anyone travelling from Belgium specifically for NYFF should first match flights and accommodation to the detailed schedule once it is released. Film at Lincoln Center says single tickets go on sale on 15 September, with earlier access for eligible pass holders and members. Screenings take place around Lincoln Center, including the Walter Reade Theater and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center on West 65th Street, but the venue and time for Bardi remain unannounced.

Belgian nationals also need an international passport and the appropriate US travel authorisation. Belgium’s FPS Foreign Affairs — FOD Buitenlandse Zaken in Dutch and SPF Affaires étrangères in French — advises travellers to apply for an ESTA or visa as soon as their plans are known and to recheck the authorisation before departure. Eligibility depends on nationality, travel history and the purpose of the trip; an approved ESTA does not itself guarantee admission at the US border. A Belgian passport application is handled by the resident’s commune or gemeente, while FPS Foreign Affairs recommends registering temporary US travel through Travellers Online and arranging adequate medical and repatriation insurance. Non-Belgian residents should follow the rules attached to their own nationality rather than assume Belgian eligibility applies to them.

For audiences staying in Belgium, the sensible course is to monitor Hadid’s producers, European festival programmes and local art-house schedules after the premiere. French-language cultural broadcaster Arte has previously listed Bardi among its committed documentary projects, which gives the film a European institutional connection, but it does not establish a Belgian cinema or streaming date.

The next firm milestone is NYFF’s schedule publication in late August, followed by talent announcements expected in early September and general ticket sales on 15 September. The festival opens on 25 September and closes on 12 October. Bardi’s precise premiere date, additional festival bookings and eventual Belgian availability remain unknown.

The larger question will be how viewers respond to Hadid’s balance between cultural observation and myth-making. Heritage practitioners may value the attention paid to transmission, skill and fraternity; documentary audiences may ask how freely the film moves into constructed scenes and symbolic personas. Those are not defects to settle in advance but central questions raised by a work that deliberately places fact, ritual and performance in the same arena.