Filmmaker Magazine has announced its eleventh list of 25 New Faces of Independent Film, its annual survey of new independent filmmakers steering the course of indepenendt film. Among the 25 new faces steering the current course of independent film are Tina Mabry, writer-director of Mississippi Damned, and Bradford Young, Mississippi Damned director of photography.

According to Scott Macaulay, edtior of Filmmaker Magazine:

We looked at a lot of work this year — maybe too much work, actually — and could easily have made a list of “125 New Faces.” Of the people we finally chose, every person on the list was championed passionately within our editorial team, and each person also seemed to us to be approaching their roles as filmmakers, dps, editors, actors, etc. with a broader recognition of the particular challenges and opportunities of this historical moment. We tried to select from a range of work representing different communities within our broader independent world, spanning from old-school underground cinema to political documentary, from artists for whom YouTube and user-generated platforms are integral to their process to filmmakers who are defiantly sticking to the values of old-school big-screen cinema.

Mississippi Damned, which premied at Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year, and for which Tambay posted a review here by Brandon Harris for the website Hammer For Nail, has gone on to win Special Jury Prize at Atlanta Film Festival, Audience Award at the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and Jury Award at Philadelphia Film Festival.

Of Mabry, Filmmaker Magazine had this to say:

Mabry’s a director who’s capable of immersing her audience into the type of milieu most American moviegoers have never been to and rarely get to visit onscreen. A narrative of great complexity, one that takes place over two time periods (the mid ’80s and the late ’90s) with more than a dozen intimately intertwined characters involved in key relationships, Mississippi Damned recounts the story of five black working-class couples, their progeny and extended families, and meditates on the attempts of the younger generation to escape and transcend the prejudices and failings of their families and their own victimizations within a dead-end existence.

And of Young:

His profile continues to rise with the two distinctly different projects he shot that are currently on the festival circuit: Tina Mabry’s Southern family drama, Mississippi Damned, and Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte’s gripping immigrant story, Entre nos. Young says both films highlight his sensibilities on lighting. “I’m constantly battling this idea of reconstructive reality with artificial things,” he says. “I’m always concerned that my intrusion of technology will take audiences out of the moment, so my ideal situation is to shoot with available light.”

You can read the full write-ups/biogs of all 25 who made it onto the the list on Filmmaker Magazine’s onlineSummer 2009 issue.