(Machinery clanging)
(Man recites a Zoroastrian prayer)
{Female voice-over) "The vultures swoop earthwards
'to perform their funereal duties.
'Solemn high priests of Ahura Mazda,
'engendering the purification of the world.
'No one knows where they come from,
'nor where they go to nest.
'In the Towers of Silence,
the vultures gnaw your soul.
Your little dog with four eyes
was made to sniff the face of your mother
'and the evil spirit was exorcised.
(Prayer continues)
(Prayer ends)
(Crows cawing)
(Cawing)
(Baby crying)
I'm sorry.
I want you to treat this child as if he were my own.
It's forbidden to enter. It's an abandoned Tower of Silence.
Sacred burial ground of the Zoroastrians.
Is this where corpses are left to be devoured by vultures?
It's grotesque.
You speak in ignorance.
The vultures are divine ministers that strip the soul of its flesh.
The skeleton is dried by the sun and thrown into a well
where it gradually crumbles to dust,
Rich and poor meet on a level of equality after death.
My mother was laid to rest here.
(Echoing shrieks)
Tell me about your childhood.
I was born here.
My father was in the army.
He was a Muslim.
My mother was from a Zoroastrian family.
They fell in love. It was quite a scandal.
Zoroastrians don't tolerate marriage outside their own community.
A few years after I was born,
they divorced and she went back to her parents.
She died when I was five.
After that, I went to live with my father for a while.
One day...
...he disappeared.
This is where I saw my father for the last time.
In the beginning, there existed twin spirits
who represented good and evil
Both possessed creative power.
Ahura Mazda is light and life,
and Ahriman, darkness and death.
Although nature is divided and rent asunder by two conflicting principles,
man is free to choose
and will bring about the ultimate triumph of good
for the overthrow and annihilation of evil.
You're under arrest.
(Father urinates)
(Crowd sounds)
(Dog barks)
(Howling)
(Recitation from the Koran)
You grieve for a rabid dog.
The Prophet has said the saliva of the dog is unclean.
Allah sends dogs to hell
(Chant praising God)
(Woman) 'I see a distant land.
'Something is written,
'something unresolved,
"The levels of time are confused.'
A tapestry of dreams,
reality woven into fiction.
I see successive revolutions perpetuating a corrupt system.
There is & dark man struggling against the forces of oppression
I see for him a violent death.
You bore his child.
I see him returning to his birthplace.
I hear the rush of wings.
(Beeps horn)
Wait for me.
There are some instructions I have to give the workers.
You're under arrest.