Tareque Masud’s 61th birthday today
Today is the 61th birthday of Tareque Masud, a Bangladeshi film director, film producer, screenwriter and lyricist.
He first found success with the films Muktir Gaan (1995) and Matir Moina (2002), for which he won three international awards, including the International Critics’ FIPRESCI Prize, in the Directors’ Fortnight section outside competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. The film became Bangladesh’s first film to compete for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
He died in a road accident on 13 August 2011 while returning to Dhaka from Manikganj on the Dhaka-Aricha highway after visiting a filming location. Masud was working on Kagojer Phool (The Paper Flower). In 2012, he posthumously received Ekushey Padak, the highest civilian award of Bangladesh. In 2013, New York University Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and South Asia Solidarity Initiative, hosted the first North American retrospective of his films.
Masud was born in 1956. Masud grew up at Nurpur village of Bhanga Upazila in Faridpur District. He started his education in an Islamic madrasah. He studied in the madrassa system for eight years, till the upheaval brought about by the 9-month Liberation War interrupted his education. After the war, he entered general education, completing his HSC from Notre Dame College and completed his master’s degree in History from the University of Dhaka.
Tareque was involved in the film society movement from his university days and started his first film, Adam Surat (The Inner Strength), a documentary on the Bangladeshi painter SM Sultan, in 1982. His 1995 feature-length documentary on the 1971 Liberation War, Muktir Gaan (Song of Freedom), brought record audiences and became a cult classic. 
He also made many other films on the war, including Muktir Kotha (Words of Freedom, 1999), Narir Kotha (Women and War, 2000) and Naroshundor (The Barbershop, 2009). In 2002, he completed his feature film Matir Moina (The Clay Bird), which was based on his childhood experience in the madrassa.
As a part of his filmmaking work, he was a pioneer of the independent film movement in Bangladesh. In 1986, Tareque was a founding member of Bangladesh Short Film Forum, the leading platform for independent filmmakers in Bangladesh.
In 1988, he organized the country’s first International Short and Documentary Film Festival, which is held on a biannual basis to this day. He was also known as the ‘Cinema Feriwalla’ for the way in which he showed his films, touring remote towns and villages throughout the country with his mobile projection unit.
His wife, American-born film editor Catherine Masud, was his creative and life partner. They met at the time he was completing work on Adam Surat and spent the next two decades making films together through their production house Audiovision. Together they wrote scripts, often co-directed, and toured the country and the world with their films. Catherine Masud also edited all of their work.
Source: wikipedia
