Tareque Masud: The clay bird carried on the quintessence of life

The Bangladeshi film Matir Moina (The Clay Bird), which premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival was a revelation. The film was premiered as part of the Directors' Fortnight competition and won the International Critics' prize (Fipresci) for its "authentic, moving, and delicate portrayal of a country struggling for its democratic rights," making it the first Bangladeshi film to receive recognition at Cannes. 

The Clay Bird was the first film selected by Bangladesh to be widely distributed internationally and to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. 

A young lower-middle-class kid is sent away by his orthodox Muslim father to a madrasah, much to his mother's dismay, in the film The Clay Bird, which explores the influence of religious conviction on a family's lives in the 1960s. Masud, however, casts a wider net, revealing the complexity and diversity of Bangladeshi life, as well as the conflict between moderate and radical elements of Islam and the country's rich musical traditions. Like the protagonist of "The Clay Bird" Anu, Tareque Masud also spent the majority of his childhood at a Bangladeshi madrasa during the escalating unrest in East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was then known.

Even though the French government and MK2, a production and distribution company based in Paris, provided some financial support for The Clay Bird, Masud nonetheless put his entire life's savings into the movie. Only two professional actors made up the cast, which was assembled over the course of an entire year and a half using local students, teachers, street kids, and villages, as well as actual locales.

Masud's own childhood experiences at a madrasah during the liberation war of Bangladesh served as the inspiration for The Clay Bird. Masud abandoned his religious studies after the country gained independence in 1971 and enrolled in general education, eventually earning a master's degree in history from Dhaka University. He participated in a number of cinema-related courses and workshops in Bangladesh and overseas and has been actively involved in the film society movement since his university days.

Tareque Masud has been involved with film organisations for a long time and supported the short film movement in Bangladesh in the 1980s. Together with two other significant Bangladeshi directors, Tanvir Mokammel and Morshedul Islam, he created the Bangladesh Short Film Forum in 1986. In December 1988, Tareque organised the first Dhaka International Short Film Festival.

Adam Surat (The Inner Strength), a documentary about the Bangladeshi painter SM Sultan, was the subject of Masud's first film and took him seven years to complete. By then, he had already married Chicago native Catherine Shapere, with whom he had developed a deep professional bond. Together, they directed a variety of documentaries for their own Dhaka-based production company, Audiovision, as well as produced, co-wrote, and edited The Clay Bird.

Most notable among them was Muktir Kotha (Words of Freedom, 1999), which follows a music troupe that sings songs to inspire freedom fighters during the liberation war of Bangladesh. They found footage of American director Lear Levin in the basement of Levin's New York home, and this footage served as the foundation for the majority of the movie. Another outstanding piece was A Kind of Childhood (2002), which chronicled the difficulties faced by working children in Dhaka over the course of six years.

Tareque Masud was killed in a car crash at the age of 54. On 13 August, 2011, Tareque and seven others were in Manikganj searching for possible locations for his upcoming film Kagojer Phool (The Paper Flower), which is presumably a "prequel" to his acclaimed film Matir Moina (The Clay Bird, 2002).

Tareque Masud and Catherine had been working on The Paper Flower, a film that aims to depict the politics and culture of Bengal in the 1930s and 1940s. They produced and directed two more feature films, Runway and Ontorjatra (The Inner Journey, 2006), as well as a few documentaries during this time (2010). Both films portray the identity politics of Bangladeshis at home and abroad by focusing on modern topics including globalization and migration