Biography

Faisal Azam

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Faisal Azam is an award-winning film editor and screenwriter best known for the Oscar-nominated documentary short St. Louis Superman; Brooklyn Film Festival Grand Prize Winner Without Shepherds; and Salar, which won Best Dramatic Short at the Austin Film Festival and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. In 2016, Faisal co-wrote H8, which was a top-ten finalist in numerous national competitions and a winner in WeScreenplay's 2018 TV pilot contest.

Over the course of his career, Faisal has worked with National Geographic, Dan Rather Reports, USA Network, Al Jazeera, Sports Illustrated, HBO, The New York Times and Washington Post. His work has been featured at Sundance, Tribeca, Clermont-Ferrand, Big Sky, Palm Springs, Slamdance, and BFI London. Faisal serves as an Emmy Awards judge and is represented by Zero Gravity Management, creators of the TV show Ozark.
- IMDb mini biography by: Erica Velis

Wrote a senior honors thesis in college exploring the themes of power and resistance in Franz Kafka's novels.
Grew up in Dubai, Saudi Arabia and California.
Was high school classmates with Julienne Hanzelka Kim and Jordan Ladd.

My earliest cognition of editing occurred at the age of eight in, of all places, Saudi Arabia, where television shows are heavily censored to remove even the slightest reference to sexuality. One day I became aware of all these narrative interruptions: inexplicable gaps that disrupted love scenes and rendered stories virtually incoherent. I became curious about these 'missing parts' and was soon preoccupied by a secret wish to soften the brutality of these jarring cuts.
I've always felt that film editing is very close to music composition because an editor manipulates time and deals with intangible things like tone, rhythm, and pacing, all of which are felt on an unconscious level and exert an undeniably powerful influence on the viewer. When an audience laughs or cries--the power doesn't just come from the story, the image or the performance, but from the way that all these elements are combined, layered and juxtaposed.

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