Cinema
Song of Freedom
Muktir Gaan
Synopsis
1971. A troupe of artists, the Bangladesh Mukti Sangrami Shilpi Sangstha, travels by truck through the refugee camps and the liberated zones: its members sing patriotic songs, including those of Tagore and Nazrul, and stage puppet shows and plays to support the fighters and those whom the war has thrown onto the roads. The film follows their journey and combines footage shot at the time with other archive images.
Context
Lear Levin, an American filmmaker, had filmed the troupe in 1971. Tareque and Catherine Masud started from these images and added archives gathered in the United Kingdom and in India; the film combines documentary and fiction in a musical construction. Catherine Masud edited it, and it was released on 1 December 1995. From 1996 to 1999, travelling teams screened it as far as the remotest parts of the country, a journey that in turn became a film by the same authors.
Who it is for
An eighty-minute documentary, in Bengali, made up of songs, camp scenes and archive footage.
Prizes and reception
It drew a record number of viewers for a documentary in Bangladesh, and remains a reference work on the liberation war.