Tareque Masud

Narir Kotha is an exploration of the experience of women in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. During the war, thousands of women were systematically raped and tortured by the Pakistan Army and their collaborators. But they were not only victims of sexual violence, they were also in the front lines of the popular resistance against the occupying Army, as fighters and martyrs. Narir Kotha is an attempt to explore some of these stories, through the words of the women themselves.

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The current struggles and future dreams of working children in Bangladesh

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This historic film, completed in 1995 by filmmaking duo Tareque Masud and Catherine Masud tells the true story of a troupe of singers traveling through the refugee camps and zones of war during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. The film blends documentary and fictional genres in a musical structure to tell the story of the birth of a nation and the ideals of secularism and tolerance on which it was founded. The filmmakers combined footage of the cultural troupe and their activities, shot by American filmmaker Lear Levin in 1971, with historic footage collected from archives around the world, to create “Muktir Gaan” (Song of Freedom).

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A man and a woman meet after a long unexplained separation. Gradually over the course of a strained and oblique conversation, the nature of their shared past is revealed. This film grew out of a casual conversation between feminist writer and filmmaker Shameem Akhter and Masud. When Shameem mentioned the plot of a feminist short story she had written, Masud immediately suggested it be made into a short film. Shameem herself plays the female role, while noted actor Pijush Bandhapadhyay plays the mysterious male visitor who turns up at her door. The theme of an independent working woman, supporting a family household, was new to Bangladesh cinema in the early 1990s. This reflected the changing face of a rapidly urbanizing society with a growing population of educated wage- earning women, and in some ways paralleled the developments of Satyajit Ray’s 1963 classic Mahanagar. In this sense Se was a pioneering work for Bangladesh in expressing the new feminist ethos of the 1990s generation.

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Adam Surat is the first film directed by Tareque Masud. It is a documentary about Bangladeshi painter Sheikh Mohammed Sultan (aks SM Sultan). Masud started the film in 1982 and completed seven years later.

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