Shilajit Mitra

“The past is not dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. Everything in Barzakh — images, ideas, sounds — responds to that famously Faulknerian sentiment. The title refers to a kind of limbo, an earthly purgatory, where the dead move amidst the living. The six-part series has been shot in the ravishing Hunza Valley, in Northern Pakistan, and is drenched in a despairing, deciduous beauty. Characters converse in pseudo-spiritualistic fragments and heartsick hokum (and also do shrooms). Mountains, as usual, hold the key to everything. Watching the series, I found myself nervously wondering if, across the border, the director Imtiaz Ali was paying attention. What if he feels a little bested, and takes it up as a challenge?