Life, death and two Fawad Khans: Asim Abbasi on his new series, ‘Barzakh’

livemint.com:

Barzakh, directed by Asim Abbasi and streaming on Zee 5 from 19 July onwards, is a uniquely dark fable. Set in ‘The land of Nowhere’, it’s about an old man gathering his family for his third wedding. “Third and final," he says emphatically.

The family, however, does not get to meet his bride, since she — the love of his life — died 60 years ago. Here magic realism is served with a gorgeously surreal aesthetic, and, honestly, I haven’t seen anything like it. Barzakh — which means limbo — is stylistically and ambitiously so far ahead of what we are currently making in the subcontinent that I felt compelled to speak to its creator, the British-Pakistani director Asim Abbasi who had also created the burkha-vigilante show Churails (also on Zee5) that I had adored.

Speaking on a video call from London, Abbasi told me what Barzakh put him through and what he was trying to accomplish through this wild, dreamy fantasy. “I wanted to deal with themes of memory and passage of time, and death and afterlife, and what intergenerational trauma looks like between fathers and sons," Abbasi says. “I was conceiving this during the pandemic.

I was coping with personal losses because my father had passed away a few years ago, but I was also just trying to make sense of loss as an entity generally for everyone." The filmmaker settled on a singularity. “I can comfort myself that actually, that’s not the end. Death is so heavily tied with rebirth and what was gone is coming back in whatever shape or form they’re coming back in." “For me, the show is about what connects all of us and what will remain once we don’t remain in this universe as human beings." When Abbasi took the idea for Barzakh to Zee5’s Shailja Kejriwal, who also executive