We are very excited to share that we will be joining the Oscilloscope family as their latest acquisition!

Oscilloscope continues to be a champion of some of the boldest films being pushed today and we couldn’t be more proud to be working with them.

The film will be released  theatrically later this summer.

Read more about it here.

The week started with a screening sponsored by Rooftop Films of short clips from all of this year’s IFP Lab films — both documentaries and narratives–  and it was fun to share our teaser with a live audience, in such a great open air setting.

Wednesday we showed a short clip of These Birds Walk at a special screening for Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces”  at the IFC Center in New York.  We were in great company with other short films, the hilarious web series’ The Slope, and Julia Pott’s great animated short, Belly. Following the screening, Bassam and Omar were invited to sit on a panel with Blue Valentine’s Derek Cianfrance and take questions from the audience.

We’ve been enjoying watching our film on a large screen, we can’t wait til we can share it with all of you!

Read the article here.

Omar and I get really worried about what we put out there of our film. That tends to make us pull back more than we should.

Here are some stills from our film:

http://thesebirdswalk.tumblr.com

Great news to share. Our little film has been selected as a grantee of Sundance Film Institute. Both Omar and I will be attending the Film Festival as “fellows” for our film, These Birds Walk.  This gives us the much-needed validation (and funds) for us to get to the finish line of our production.

Omar and I have come a long from that first day we exchanged emails about working on a film about Abdul Sattar Edhi two years ago.

The documentary finally has a name, These Birds Walk. And it is my pleasure to share the teaser poster for our labor of love. It has been a long time coming and there is still a long way to go, but we are very excited about how it is all coming together. Please stay tuned as we unveil more about the film in the coming weeks. — Bassam

Omar is now in Kabul with the acclaimed photographers and journalists apart of the Basetrack team.

I, Bassam, am back in the States trying to get settled back into the city life.

I thought it would be appropriate to share some production stills from three of the subjects from our documentary.

A toothless tiffin wallah over the age of 70 bikes across Karachi delivering meals in the morning. He then spends his night working at the sleaziest cinemaa in town tearing tickets. He works close to 14 hours a day, reaches home around 11 PM and then starts the cycle again the next day at 8 in the morning. We encroach on his life at the start of his day and the end. We mic him, tell him to speak up, make him bike through unsafe intersections and then tell him to do it all over again. We take more time from the tiffin wallah, leaving less time for himself.

And like any man who gets tired of being told what to do, he flips. He says, “sisterfuckers have bothered me too much” and then another time, “these American’s have made my life a living hell.” Did the tiffin wallah forget he’s mic’d? I fear when we are done filming, he will be upset and will give us his fair share of Punjabi profanity.  But when he leaves, he smiles, he asks if we would like some chai from his house. We decline, he smiles again like a toothless baby and continues on his merry way to his shantytown neighborhood. I wonder if he purposefully said all those things into the mic so we would know that he is irritated, that he doesn’t really like us, and that he just doing this as a nice gesture. There is also a chance the discomfort wasn’t worth his time to mention as it would take away from the little time that he had left for himself.