Words of Freedom

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.

A family must come to grips with its culture, its faith, and the brutal political changes entering its small-town world.

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).

A young man who lives nearby an airport finds himself in trouble upon meeting a mysterious stranger.

A mother and her son return to their home in Sylhet, Bangladesh after 15 years abroad and try to retrace their roots. Beginning with the death of the father of the family, the film proceeds with the central characters seeking a link to their lives.

Set against the backdrop of the Pakistan Army crackdown during Bangladesh’s 1971 war, this political thriller follows a student activist who takes refuge from the Pakistan army in a local barbershop.

This is a film which challenges our notions of child labor. It peeks into a world where the concept of childhood as we know it has no meaning, where children support their parents, and where work is just another part of growing up. This is Dhaka, Bangladesh. Following several children over a period of six years, A KIND OF CHILDHOOD is an attempt to focus on the realities of child labor, with real children, their struggles and dreams.

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.

The current struggles and future dreams of working children in Bangladesh