Nine days before this year’s Sundance Film Festival kicks off in Park City, Utah (happening January 21-31), University of Michigan graduate and filmmaker Sultan Sharrief, 25, was in Los Angeles, putting the final touches on his 16mm movie, “Bilal’s Stand,” which will be featured in the Festival’s new NEXT program. The film will be screened locally at 6 p.m. on Sunday, January 31 at the Michigan Theater.

“Hopefully, tonight (the film) will be in the mail and on its way to Sundance,” Sharrief said, with a tired chuckle, during a recent phone interview.

“Stand” tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young, black, Muslim man in Detroit who’s caught between his educational aspirations — to attend the University of Michigan — and his obligations regarding the family’s taxi stand.

Sharrief, founder of a program for young people called EFEX (Encouraging the Filmmaking EXperience), enlisted the help of students from both U-M and Detroit area high schools to make “Stand,” which was filmed over the course of 3 years.

In terms of raising money to make the film, “I like to say that we did Obama before Obama did Obama,” said Sharrief. “Instead of finding 1 or 2 people who could contribute thousands of dollars, we had lots of people who gave us 20 dollars.”

About 40 “Stand” cast and crew members will make the trip to Sundance. “We’ll be lodging with U-M alumni in the Park City area, and with people we’ve met during the process or already know,” said Sharrief. “So most of us are camping out in sleeping bags in various places, but we’re just happy to be there.”

Even so, Sharrief has sometimes had to emphasize to his former student volunteers what it means for “Stand” to have been chosen from more than 7,000 submissions for inclusion in the festival.

“I’ve had to explain to some of them that it’s a pretty big deal,” said Sharrief. “I’ll say, if this were about going to college, this is like a full-ride scholarship to Harvard. And they’ll say, ‘That sounds like it’s good.’”

“Stand” was one of only 8 films selected for Sundance’s new NEXT program, which Sundance director John Cooper has described as being “designed to cordon off space for low and no-budget filmmaking and is a showcase for 8 ‘younger, fresher’ American filmmakers that live and breathe true indie spirit.”

This description certainly seems to apply to Sharrief and his longtime project — but he didn’t get the good news from Sundance right away.

“It’s kind of a funny story,” said Sharrief. “They tried to get a hold of me for 2 weeks.”

Indeed, Sundance reps were confronted for days with Sharrief’s perpetually full voicemail box; and because Sharrief’s day were more than packed at the time — working on Ann Arbor native Qasim Basir’s “Mooz-lum” with Danny Glover, as well as helping EFEX students work on their final projects — it wasn’t until “Stand” executive producer (and U-M faculty member) Terry Sarris spoke with Sharrief and told him Sundance was trying to reach him that he found out, the day before Thanksgiving, that “Stand” would be part of the 2010 Festival.

“I first thought they had made some kind of mistake and got their wires crossed,” said Sharrief. “I asked the woman I talked to, ‘Are you sure it’s “Bilal’s Stand,” and not something else?” And she said, ‘I watched it two times, and I cried both times.’”

This year’s festival won’t be Sharrief’s first trip to Sundance. He attended as a spectator in 2006. “It’s not what I thought it would be,” said Sharrief. “It had become more Hollywood than I had imagined. ‘Thank You for Smoking’ was screened, along with ‘Friends with Money.’ Big movies like that. It was intimidating. I was starting ‘Bilal’ — I was in the pre-production process — and here’s Jennifer Aniston walking around, and I thought, ‘This is what I’m up against. I just have this little movie with no money.’ But I stuck with it and applied anyway.”

Sharrief explains that “Stand”’s filmmaking process, as well as the plotline itself, involved letting people tell their own stories rather than having their identities dictated by others. Throughout the production, the filmmaker has showed “Stand” to many community groups and high school students, making adjustments based on their feedback.

“That’s what makes the film unique and honest in a way,” he said. “It’s not just me telling a story. The film became a dialogue.”

Sultan Sharrief talks about the making of "Bilal's Stand" on Sundance's b-side page:

Of course, given recent events, Sharrief feels it’s more important than ever to offer a narrative about a young Muslim man who counters what Americans are now hearing and seeing in the media.

“If you’re a black Muslim in Metro Detroit, everyone has their own idea of what you are,” said Sharrief. “I turn on the news, and they’re talking about my identity, but that’s not me, and it’s not most people like me. It’s like, no pun intended, someone’s hijacked your identity.”

But Sharrief also believes that “Stand,” despite its specificity, speaks to everyone, and while he hopes to get a distribution deal at Sundance, he has his own grassroots back-up plan for getting the film out to the public.

“Because even though it’s about a black Muslim kid in Detroit,” Sharrief said, “it’s really just about a human being who wants something.”

Jenn McKee is the entertainment digital journalist for AnnArbor.com. Reach her at jennmckee@annarbor.com or 734-623-2546, and follow her on Twitter @jennmckee.

Watch the "Bilal's Stand" trailer: