Two concerts were held at Madison Square Gardens in New York on the afternoon and evening of August 1, 1971 to raise money and awareness for the plight of war refugees in Bangladest as organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar. 40,000 attended the two shows. The album of the event won the highly coveted Grammy Award Album of the Year for 1972. Eric Clapton would be on three album's of the year in his career, Bangladesh, his own Unplugged in 1992 and Santana's Supernatural in 1999. Clapton is on two of the only four live albums to win album of the year. He almost didn't make Bangladesh however due to his heroin problem. As a last minute replacement Taj Mahall guitarist Jesse Ed Davis was chosen but Clapton did show up and Davis remained in the stage lineup. Clapton is pretty much a sideman here and does no singing and only one guitar solo. Ravi Shankar starts out the concert with his band of Indian musicians, Ustad All Akbar Khan, Alla Rakah and Kamala Chak Ravarty in a long, long set. The concert also features Harrison's former Beatle band mate Ringo Starr. Fellow former Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney were invited to take part. McCartney declined but Lennon accepted and just two days before the concert when Harrison informed Lennon that it was he who was to perform and not Yoko Ono, Lennon dropped out. Also from the Beatles days, Billy Preston is here and Klaus Voorman. Apple recording stars Badfinger, are part of the ensemble stage band. Leon Russell and special guest Bob Dylan round out the big name stars. Also here are Jim Horn and The Hollywood Horns as well as Carl Radle, Jim Keltner, Don Preston, and backup singers Don Nix, Jo Green, Jeanie Greene, Marlin Grenne, Dolores Hall and Claudia Linnear. Saul Swimmer directed this documentary. He would go on to do the acclaimed Queen We Will Rock You documentary 10 years later. His attempts at directing feature films were forgettable. He was credited also as being a co-producer of the Beatle documentary Let It Be. Harrison was concerned that larger 32MM film cameras would be too imposing so he opted for the use of smaller 16MM film cameras. Richard E. Brooks and Fred Hoffman were the principal cinematographers of the eight man film crew that also included Sol Negrin and Tohru Nakamura. Brooks was like the Ed Wood of cinematography whose career consisted of filming low budget obscure bad feature films. When this film premiered in March of 1972 it was 140 minutes in length but somehow got chopped down by 45 minutes to a 95 minute run-time. I saw this during it's initial theatrical release and have seen it maybe one since and I have not seen it's new DVD version. It's a low budget film with no imaginative camera work and the Ravi Shankar segment is to long but it captures some great performances by a great cast of stars and recording and touring musicians. I would give this a 7.5 out of 10.