Tareque Masud (1956-2011) was a Bangladeshi independent film director, producer, screenwriter, and one of the defining voices of the country’s independent film movement.

On 13 August 2011, he died in a road accident alongside cinematographer Ashfaque Munier Mishuk, while working on an unfinished film, Kagojer Phool (The Paper Flower).

In 1986 he became a founding member of the Bangladesh Short Film Forum, and in 1988 he organized the country’s first International Short and Documentary Film Festival. He earned the nickname “Cinema Feriwalla” (the cinema peddler) for touring remote towns and villages with a mobile projector to screen his films directly for the people they were about.

His creative and life partner was Catherine Masud, an American-born film editor whom he met while completing his early documentary Adam Surat. They married in 1988 and worked as directors, co-writers, and editors on nearly every film that followed.

These films let people speak for themselves. A tribute made entirely of words, extends the same discipline into design. This experimental series set out to test how much of a film’s essence and meaning can be expressed using nothing but text.