Beyond the pale of the pap the public has been conditioned to regard as Entertainment, here is another film that undeservedly will go by the board. Though set in a Muslim, then united (East and West) Greater Islamic State of Pakistan and critical of religious extremism, it also is careful to present within the otherwise strict madrasa a teacher, Ibrahim (Moin Ahmed), who voices the sympathetic, tolerant and spiritual side of the Prophet, which some will find unwelcome. And although it covers the Pakistani military's martial law and massacre of opposition politicians, students and Hindus in March 1971, the toy-sounding rifle cracks and dying are offstage, not a drop of screen blood or violence, the torched village only reflected in eyes and, after the fact, charred walls.

The first Bangladeshi feature selected for Cannes, where to standing ovations it won the FIPRESCI International Critics' Prize, The Clay Bird/Matir Moina is the first full feature from Audiovision, the Dhaka production company of director Tareque Masud and his Chicago-born wife and co-screenwriter Catherine. Based loosely on the husband's childhood in Faridpur -- the cinema village of Fulpur -- the film unhysterically yet firmly takes to task the life-denying facets of Islamic fundamentalism but, as indicated, also shows the reverse of the coin, love, peace and equality. And, as educated, semi-Westernized Milon (Soaeb Islam) and his student radical friends (Golam Mahmud, Pradip Mittra Mithun) only half-jokingly realize, the mostly European -isms are equally self-serving, the stadium is aflame, English and Muslim field games have finished, and the only way left for Bangladesh is to fight for its heritage and independence.

Blended into the unfamiliar, complex historical mix is Ibrahim's unfortunately undramatic lecture, where the story stops for his sermon that, not Islam's politics and sword, but its knowledge and thought, will preserve peaceful wholeness.
Caught somewhere in the middle is Kazi (Joyanto Chattopadhyay), Milon's older brother and the father of young Anu (Nurul Islam Bablu). The boy, sent to madrasa to get him on the right path and away from the uncle's open-mindedness that extends to "all that Hindu rubbish" of celebrations and music, occupies the bulk of the film as sad, sad-eyed center. (A number of strong recent films look at a non-Western world through children or women.)

Alongside, quietly, the equally sad, "full of fervor" father is unveiled: a Koran-spouting rural homeopath-pharmacist, he squashes youthful joy from the woman who married him at fourteen, Ayesha (Rokeya Prachy), and his son and fragile daughter Asma (Lameesa R. Reemjheem, Prachy's real-life daughter), the latter of whom will suffer the consequences of religious rejection of doctors and antibiotics against the will of Allah. Muslims will not, cannot, raise arms against brothers, he insists, analogous to 'thirties Austrian and German Jews, and the subsequent awakening leaves him shattered, the most pathetic of them all.

At school, his name Islamized, Anu/"Anwar the Animal" is a stranger and outcast, befriended only by the equally "weirdo" Rokon (Russell Farazi), gentle with his secret garden, imaginary companion and trance-like states. Characters pulled by simple village upbringings and birdlimed in "Fatima's curse of fratricidal war," their inner conflicts play out against a backdrop of water-land--rivers and canals, wood-reed boats, storms and floods; ablutions, toothbrushing, laundry and ritual cures all in the dirty brown Dhaleswari -- and of the ever-present song that furnishes religious and secular folk entertainment highlighted by, not limited to, enthralled faces at Sufi bard Karim "Boyati"/"Singer" Majhi's (Shah Alam Dewan) recital of Abraham and Isaac.

Nothing against professionals, they say, but from their background in non-fiction's "more flexible and less self-conscious" people, the Masuds have chosen a cast with only two full professionals -- the father and mother -- and a "fluke" find in the stoic Bablu, a village child come to work as house servant in the city. Avoiding artificial lighting, sharp focus or emphasis on color in a colorfully clothed land of weathered fairy-tale architecture, to tell its story instead through faces, this Oscar submission was banned on religious grounds in its native country and released in France, only then to be allowed at home in cut versions.

But the Film Censor Board had misread, for The Clay Bird is a positive plea for the sane middle ground amidst the insistence of extremism. In the town singer's verses, while "colored birds circle freely in the sky, the clay bird laments . . . bound by worldly chains," the same fair bluebird ocarina the boy buys for his sister, the same birds that sing for Karim when Abraham and Isaac are released from the bond of blood sacrifice at that place called Jehovah-jireh. 

(Released by Milestone Films; not rated by MPAA.)