Mukthir Gaan (Song of Freedom) is the first-ever full-length feature film on Bangladesh's 1971 liberation war. In 1971, the Bengali revolt against Pakistani domination and the subsequent army crackdown captured world headlines on an unprecedented scale. The papers enthusiastically dubbed it "The Bengali Holocaust". For a war-weary generation in the West, already on edge from Vietnam war protests, the "genocide" in the Subcontinent inflamed passions and triggered agitation against US arms policy, blockades against Navy ships, and guerrilla theatre in front of the White House and Hyde Park.
Yet, for an event that inspired such passionate, and seemingly selfless (unlike Vietnam, there were no Americans coming home in body bags) acts of defiance in the West, the Bengali liberation struggle disappeared from radar screens with unseemly haste. There were no collected "guerilla poems", no romantic novels with heroes parachuting into the middle of occupied Dhaka, no anniversary articles in the New York Times.
The media disappearing act was helped by the fact that the liberation struggle's charismatic leader Sheikh Mujib turned out to be an inept administrator, and his 1975 assassination left no larger-than-life leader to glamorise. Ultimately, media sources moved by their usual logic. With the end of the war, there were no more dead bodies—reporters simply got bored and moved on.
Feeding Frenzy