Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq are among a handful of directors selected for Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces” in 2012 who are taking their debut features to this year’s SXSW Film Festival (alongside Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye’s Our Nixon, Ornana’s euphonia and Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher). Mullick and Tariq’s These Birds Walk, an alumni of the IFP Documentary Labs, is a moving and lyrical portrait of a home for young runaway boys and street children in Karachi, Pakistan, run by the humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi and his Edhi Foundation. The beautifully shot film (lensed by Mullick, a former photographer) was picked up by Oscilloscope prior to its …

Banner news first: two days into the 10th annual True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri’s immensely likable documentary/hybrid-friendly showcase, the marquee title of the six films I’ve seen so far from the slate (three of which I saw before arriving) is Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq’s These Birds Walk. The starting point is Abdul Sattar Edhi, a Pakistani humanitarian and founder of a number of shelters, rehab centers and other faculties for the dispossessed. As he washes naked runaway children, some pitifully scrawny, he says his philanthropic reputation and prominence mean nothing; to understand his work you have to understand common …

There’s been a lot going on with our current crop of 25 New Faces, so I thought I’d do a quick catchup of recent goings on. Firstly, four feature projects by 2012 alums are playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival: there’s a world premiere for Ornana’s first narrative feature, Euphonia, while Bassam Tariq and Omar Mullick’s evocative documentary These Birds Walk (a world premiere at True/False later this month), Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher (which was actually shot in Austin) and Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye’s archival doc Our Nixon will continue their fest circuit runs there. (Incidentally, Lane and …

The first rule of Film Week is that if you have time to blog during Film Week, you’re probably not doing it right. The second rule of Film Week is that if you attend, the best part is that you will meet all kinds of awesome people making awesome films. This may intimidate you. It’s okay. Be cool. I guess that’s the third rule of Film Week, bro: just be cool. When the good folks at Filmmaker Magazine asked me to blog about Film Week again this year, I knew I wanted to write about some of the awesome people …

A year ago, I met, fell for and married another filmmaker in three months. We spent the year getting lost in our own world of odd hours, late nights, and bursts of travel–it turns out we are part of a loose tribe of shooters and lovers of the documentary film world. Nowhere has this tribe been more pronounced than at the IFP Labs, where six of the films produced this year involve similar pairs. Some people may cringe at the idea of spending 24/7 with their partner for weeks on end. But to members of our tribe, whose passions often …

This morning, the Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) announced the 10 films selected to participate in its 2012 IFP Documentary Lab, which takes place all this week in New York City. The slate for this eighth edition of the doc labs is very geographically diverse, with participants hailing from Washington, Kentucky and Berlin in addition to the usual indie strongholds of Los Angeles and New York City. Each year, 20 indie films with budgets under $1 million — 10 documentary and 10 narrative — are selected for participation in the IFP post-production labs, which gives filmmakers strategic help and guidance regarding …