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Like Osama, the first film made in post-Taliban Afghanistan, The Clay Bird, the first film from Bangladesh to be released in the US, looks at fanaticism, intolerance, and other disasters of history from a child’s point of view with a combination of clumsy earnestness and luminous simplicity. Young Anu (recalling, as does the film’s lyric melancholy, Satyajit Ray’s great Apu Trilogy) has annoyed his Muslim fundamentalist father for the last time, going off to enjoy the heathen Hindu celebrations with his happy-go-lucky, communist Uncle Milon. So dad sends him to the madrasa, a Taliban-like school for impoverished or wayward kids. The time is the late ’60s/early ’70s, as the movement for Bengal liberation grows and the Pakistani dictatorship prepares for one of the century’s greatest, though largely unacknowledged, genocides (three million died). Such tragedies never date, unfortunately, but the debate about whether love or control is the root of religion couldn’t be more sweetly waged than in the film’s duet between a Sufi bard and his traditional wife. The resolutions of real life are harsher; based on his own traumatic childhood experiences, director Tareque Masud’s first feature possesses both the grace and the rawness of the bird of the title. In Bangla with English subtitles. (98 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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