Watching: Death in the Garden of Paradise

Overview

Death in the Garden of Paradise is an intensely personal meditation on the murder of the filmmaker's father and sister in Lahore by an unknown intruder. The disassociation caused by traumatic loss and the impossibility of knowing the identity of the killer flow seamlessly into the film's aesthetics so that familiar sights become strange, shopkeepers and passing pedestrians become suspects, and sound is fragmented and distorted. Architecture and haunted spaces, deserted gardens, photographs and paintings are both metaphors and physical locations in this elegant elegy to mortality