BASSAM TARIQ

DIRECTOR

Bassam is Pakistani-born but Houston-raised, and uses his creativity to highlight the diversity of the Muslim experience. As well as making films, he has given a TED Talk with over 1.3m views, owns a halal butcher shop in New York, and has blogged about visiting 30 mosques in 30 states within 30 days.

 Bassam was previously a fellow of Sundance's Art Of Non Fiction Residency, and has also participated in the Sundance Screenwriters' Lab. Highlights from his filmography include the Netflix-acquired docu-short Ghosts of Sugar Land, the BAFTA-award nominated Mogul Mowgli, starring Riz Ahmed, and These Birds Walk, which the New Yorker declared one of the best 50 foreign films of the 21st century. Bassam has also been named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s ‘25 New Faces of Independent Film’, and one of L Magazine’s ‘most promising filmmakers from Brooklyn’, after moving to Queens. Off-camera, his writing has been published by TIME, the New Yorker, Huffington Post, CBC, and CNN. 

Bassam is now set to temporarily leave the world of indie films behind, after being chosen to direct a big-budget remake of Blade as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise.