The Veiled Avengers of Pakistan’s Streaming New Wave

The privatization of Pakistan’s media and television industry over the past two decades, along with the availability of high-speed internet and an easing of censorship, has revolutionized what plays in Pakistani homes. While hopes that this more open environment would encourage a Pakistani new wave have yet to be born out, an episodic series released this summer is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Film Quarterly columnist Bilal Qureshi introduces readers to one of the most exciting voices in the emerging Pakistani film industry, Asim Abbasi, whose über-stylish series Churails (2020−) presents a women’s detective agency that works undercover to obtain justice for the women of Karachi. An extrajudicial feminist fantasy, Churails is remarkably uncensored and unrestrained, and ground-breaking in its exclusive focus on women’s rage.