The Clay Bird

Tareque Masud's The Clay Bird (Matir Moina) is one of the great coming-of-age films and a landmark of Bangladeshi cinema. Set in the late 1960s in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), it follows Anu (Nurul Islam Bablu), a sensitive boy caught between his devout, authoritarian father and the political upheaval that will eventually become the 1971 Liberation War.

The film is semi-autobiographical: Masud himself attended a madrassa as a child, and his portrayal of religious education is nuanced rather than polemical. The madrassa is not a "radicalization factory" but a place of genuine spiritual formation — and also of physical abuse, rote learning, and the crushing of curiosity. Anu's mother, who secretly sends him to a secular school, represents the possibility of coexistence between faith and reason.

The film was Bangladesh's first-ever submission for the Academy Awards and won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes. Tragically, Masud died in a road accident in 2011, at age 54, while scouting locations for his next film. The Clay Bird remains his masterpiece.