Tareque Masud: The Cinema Feriwalla of Bangladesh

Tareque Masud (6 December 1956 – 13 August 2011) was the filmmaker who taught Bangladesh to see itself on screen. Working almost entirely outside the commercial industry, he and his wife and creative partner Catherine Masud built a body of work — documentaries recovered from the Liberation War's own footage, and features drawn from madrasa classrooms, migrant families and the edge of an airport runway — that carried Bangladeshi cinema to Cannes and to village courtyards alike. Rural audiences knew him by the nickname he cherished most: the "Cinema Feriwalla", the cinema peddler, the man who carried films to the people on a projector rather than waiting for the people to come to a cinema hall.

Early life: a madrasa childhood in Faridpur

Abu Tareque Masud was born on 6 December 1956 in Nurpur village, in Bhanga Upazila of Faridpur District, then part of East Pakistan. He began his education at an Islamic madrasa and spent much of his childhood inside that world of rote learning, discipline and faith — an experience he neither romanticised nor disowned, and which would later give his most famous film its emotional core.

The Liberation War of 1971 broke across that childhood. After independence, Masud left religious schooling for general education, eventually completing a master's degree in history at the University of Dhaka. The historian's training stayed with him: nearly everything he made, fiction included, was an argument about how Bangladesh should remember its past. By the late 1970s he was active in Dhaka's film society movement, part of a generation convinced that cinema could be a serious art in a poor country with almost no serious film infrastructure.

Building a movement: the Short Film Forum

In the 1980s, filmmakers who wanted to work outside the commercial studios had no institution to stand on. Masud helped build one. In 1986, with fellow directors Tanvir Mokammel and Morshedul Islam, he co-founded the Bangladesh Short Film Forum, an umbrella for the short film movement, and in December 1988 he organised the first Dhaka International Short Film Festival. The forum gave young directors screenings, debate and a collective voice; much of the independent cinema Bangladesh has today grew out of that network. Masud remained involved with film organisations for the rest of his life, treating the movement — not just his own filmography — as the work itself.

His own first film showed the patience that would define him. Adam Surat (1989), a documentary on the visionary painter S.M. Sultan, took seven years to complete. Sultan — reclusive, monumental, painting peasants as heroic figures — was an ideal first subject for a director preoccupied with the dignity of ordinary rural life.

Muktir Gaan: recovering 1971

Masud's breakthrough was an act of recovery. In 1971, American filmmaker Lear Levin had travelled with the Bangladesh Mukti Shangrami Shilpi Shangstha, the cultural troupe whose singers, actors and puppeteers performed patriotic songs in refugee camps and liberated zones to sustain the spirit of the Liberation War. Levin's footage then sat unused for two decades, stored in his basement in New York. In 1990, Tareque and Catherine tracked him down, took charge of roughly twenty hours of his material, and combined it with archive footage gathered from Britain and India.

The result, Muktir Gaan (The Song of Freedom, 1995), co-directed by Tareque and Catherine, follows the troupe through the war year in a structure that blends documentary and musical. It drew record audiences in Bangladesh and became a cult classic — for many younger Bangladeshis, it was the first moving-image encounter with the war their parents had lived. The couple then took the film back to the countryside: between 1996 and 1999, travelling projection teams screened Muktir Gaan across rural Bangladesh and recorded the audience's own memories, material that became Muktir Kotha (Words of Freedom, 1999), an oral history of 1971 assembled from the people who had survived it. Narir Kotha (2000), centred on women's experiences, extended the same project.

Matir Moina: the clay bird flies to Cannes

In 2002 Masud completed his first full-length feature, Matir Moina (The Clay Bird). Set in the late 1960s, it tells of Anu, a young boy sent by his increasingly rigid father to a madrasa, where the discipline of the institution collides with the warmth of folk Islam, the pull of family and the approach of war. It was, openly, the director's own childhood reimagined.

The film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and won the International Critics' (FIPRESCI) Prize, praised for its "authentic, moving and delicate portrayal of a country struggling for its democratic rights". It was the first Bangladeshi film to receive recognition at Cannes, and it went on to become Bangladesh's first-ever submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — an entry that announced, to the industry as much as to audiences, that Bangladeshi cinema existed beyond its borders. Masud, who also wrote songs for his films, had made an international reputation without surrendering an inch of local ground.

The recognition changed the practical position of Bangladeshi independent cinema as well as its prestige. Matir Moina was the first film from Bangladesh to be taken up for wide international distribution, travelling the festival circuit and reaching audiences in many countries — an almost unheard-of path for a low-budget Bengali-language feature made outside any studio system. At home, its portrait of a madrasa boyhood was debated precisely because it refused easy positions: the film honours the warmth, music and humanity inside religious life even as it questions rigidity, and that balance — drawn from the director's own childhood — is what critics abroad singled out and what audiences in Bangladesh argued about. Masud consistently resisted describing the film as an attack on faith; in his telling, it was a story about a society negotiating, painfully and hopefully, between tradition and change in the years before a nation was born.

Ontarjatra and Runway: belonging and its discontents

His two later features turned the camera on the questions left unresolved by his histories. Ontarjatra (2006), again co-directed with Catherine, follows a Bangladeshi mother in London and her British-raised teenage son as they return to Sylhet after fifteen years abroad, for the funeral of the husband and father left behind. It is a film about the diaspora's double absence — belonging fully neither to London nor to Sylhet — and about the generations divided by a single migration.

Runway (2010), Masud's last completed feature, came home to the runway's edge. Ruhul, a madrasa dropout, lives with his family in a shack in the shadow of Dhaka's international airport, watching aircraft carry other people to other lives. His mother Rahima keeps the family afloat by selling milk from a cow bought with a microcredit loan — a precise, unsentimental sketch of poverty at the edge of the global economy. Unemployed and searching for purpose, Ruhul drifts towards radical religious teaching. Made by a director who had himself passed through a madrasa, Runway is not an outsider's caricature of faith but an insider's warning about what fills the vacuum when a society offers its young men no work and no dignity.

The unfinished film and the road home

At his death Masud was preparing the most ambitious project of his life. Kagojer Phul (The Paper Flower) was to examine the politics and culture of Bengal in the 1930s and 1940s and the Partition of 1947 — the prequel, in effect, to the history his other films had told from 1971 onwards. Shooting had not yet begun; locations were still being chosen.

On 13 August 2011, Masud travelled with his team to Manikganj, where they visited a location in Shibalaya and were on their way to seek the district administration's permission to shoot. On the return journey to Dhaka, at Joka in Ghior Upazila, their microbus collided head-on with an oncoming passenger bus on the Dhaka–Aricha highway. Five people died: Tareque Masud; Mishuk Munier, the celebrated cinematographer, journalist and chief executive of ATN News; production staff Wasim and Jamal; and the microbus driver, Mostafizur Rahman. Catherine Masud was seriously injured and survived, along with several other passengers. Masud was 54. The coffins of Masud and Munier were placed before the Central Shaheed Minar in Dhaka on 14 August, where thousands of mourners gathered to pay their respects — a measure of how far beyond the film world the loss was felt. He was buried in his native village of Nurpur, in Faridpur.

The wrecked microbus was later preserved on the University of Dhaka campus, unveiled on 1 September 2014 near the Teacher-Student Centre as a Road Safety Memorial — a grim public monument both to the men it carried and to the road deaths that remain one of Bangladesh's deadliest everyday hazards.

Catherine Masud and the Memorial Trust

Catherine Masud, the American-born film editor who had edited all of the couple's work and co-directed much of it, survived the crash and took up the preservation of his legacy. In 2012 she founded the Tareque Masud Memorial Trust, dedicated to archiving and memorialising his work through publications, educational projects and screening programmes, and to completing what could be completed of the unfinished oeuvre. The trust also runs a short film competition for young directors, whose winner receives the Tareque Masud Young Filmmaker Award — a deliberate passing of the torch to the movement Masud had helped found a quarter-century earlier. His writings on cinema were collected in Chalachchittrajatra, first published in 2012.

The state added its own recognition: in 2012 Masud received the Ekushey Padak posthumously, Bangladesh's second-highest civilian honour. A year later, in 2013, New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the South Asia Solidarity Initiative hosted the first North American retrospective of his films.

Legacy

Tareque Masud's legacy rests on three achievements that reinforce one another. As an archivist, he rescued the Liberation War's living images from a New York basement and returned them to the nation they belonged to. As an artist, he proved in Matir Moina that a film could be rooted in a Faridpur madrasa and honoured at Cannes in the same breath — and that honesty about faith, neither devotional nor hostile, was possible in Bangladeshi cinema. As an organiser, through the Short Film Forum, the travelling screenings and the memorial trust that now bears his name, he built institutions meant to outlast any single filmmaker.

Kagojer Phul remains unfinished, and the arc of his planned history — from Partition through 1971 to the present — was never completed. But the Cinema Feriwalla's essential bargain with his audience holds: he took cinema to the people, and the people, in Bangladesh and far beyond it, have not let his films go. Each year the Memorial Trust and film societies mark his birth and death anniversaries with screenings, lectures and discussions, and his films continue to circulate as the reference point against which Bangladeshi independent cinema measures itself.