David Farnor | On 16, Feb 2019

Sundance may be over, but Netflix is still snapping up its pick of the festival, with a deal closed this week for short film Ghosts of Sugar Land.

The film, which is directed by Bassam Tariq, follows a group of young Muslim American men in Sugar Land, Texas, who ponder the disappearance of their friend “Mark,” who is suspected of joining ISIS.

The film, which premiered at the Utah festival last month, was awarded The Short Film Jury Award: Non-fiction at the festival.

Tariq, who wrote the film with Thomas Niles and produced it with Farihah Zaman, is a TED Fellow and was one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film”. His first feature, These Birds Walk, was named one of the 50 best foreign films of the 21st century by The New Yorker.

The film joins Netflix’s growing library of documentary shorts, including End Game and Period. End of Sentence., two films nominated in the Documentary Short category of this year’s Oscars, as well as previous Academy Award nominees Heroin(e) and Extremis, plus Academy Award winner The White Helmets.

Ghosts of Sugar Land can next be seen at SXSW and the True/False Film Festival.

 

Ghosts of Sugar Land is available on Netflix UK, as part of an £9.99 monthly subscription.

 

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