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Tareque Masud

Tareque Masud

Directing

Biography

Tareque Masud was an award-winning Bangladeshi independent film director. He was known for directing the films Muktir Gaan (1995) and Matir Moina (2002), for which he won a number of international awards, including the International Critics' Prize and FIPRESCI Prize for Directors' Fortnight at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. He died in a road accident on 13 August, 2011. Tareque Masud was born in Nurpur village, Bhanga Upazila, Faridpur District, Bangladesh. He studied at an Islamic madrasah as a child, but the outbreak of the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan forces in 1971 put an end to his studies at the Islamic seminary. After the war, Masud pursued general education and went on to obtain a Masters degree in History at Dhaka University. His wife, Catherine Masud, is a Chicago-born film editor.

Known For

Shey: The Conversation

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.

Shey: The Conversation

1993Movie