These two short films appear with Born of Fire on Severin’s All the Haunts Be Ours Vol. 2 set.

Towers of Silence (1975): Directed and written by Jamil Dehlavi, this is the life of a Pakistani boy’s and how his obsession with death starts after he watches the Zoroastrian rituals of purification and regeneration. It’s a black and white semi-autobiographical movie about the gulf between faiths and how someone attempts to become a man caught between them.

The tower of silence is a circular, raised structure that is used to expose human corpses to the elements and help them decompose without contaminating the soil. As the bodies are left to the elements, vultures consume them, then what is left is gathered into a pit where further weathering and continued breakdown happens.

This allows the nasu, or unclean, dead bodies to be kept from contact with earth, water or fire, all three of which are considered sacred in the Zoroastrian religion.

I loved getting to see this, as Born of Fire was such an incredible piece of film. Seeing where its creator came from made me even more fascinated by it.

Qâf (1985): Another short by Jamil Dehlavi, this is totally what I’m looking for, a wordless exploration of a volcano exploding set to the music of Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream. I mean, can it be more perfect? Just images of explosions and lava flowing down, shot while he was making Born of Fire. As strange and multilayered as that movie is, this is so simple. So mesmerizing. This may end up being something that I play when I need to write and just lose myself in music and motion. For something that I wondered why it was on the Severin box set, I have to say that this has become one of my favorite parts of it.

These short films are part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.

You can order this set from Severin.