Song of Freedom (Muktir Gaan)
India 1999, 82 minutes,
Bengali with English subtitles.
Directed by Tareque & Catherine Masud.

This historic film tells the true story of musicians travelling through the refugee camps and zones of war during the 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 film makers combined footage shot by American film maker Lear Levin in 1971 with international archival material to create this unique film (dir Tareque & Catherine Masud, India 1995, 78 mins, Bengali, with English subtitles) plus Words of Freedom (Muktir Kotha).

In some ways a follow-up to and critique of Song of Freedom, the film follows a group of projectionists, who travelled Bangladesh from 1996-8, showing films about the 1971 war. These documentary images rekindled painful memories, prompting audiences to speak of the dreams they'd had for their country, their present frustrations and new expectations. At times the open-air projection spaces would be spontaneously transformed into a concert of liberation songs. Through these interactive shows, the 'teachers' who had come from the city to spread the spirit of the war through their films, came to 'relearn' the wider history of the liberation struggle from their audiences. The struggle did not end in 1971 as the people who risked their lives and sacrificed everything during the war were still living in poverty and despair. The harvest of the war they had fought was reaped by the rich.

Words of Freedom is a film about this continuing liberation struggle, an unwritten history which is not to be found in any textbook. The film documents the unheard stories of religious and ethnic minorities, women, and other marginalized people in their own voices. It is a record of the ways in which ordinary people fell victim to genocide, rape and other atrocities and also how they fought back with whatever means they had. It is a testament to the struggle still raging in the countryside, a struggle for a more just and democratic society that was the dream of liberation.