Produced by Film Four, the film division of UK s Channel Four TV channel, Born of Fire was the second full length feature from French/Pakistani writer director Jamil Dehlavi. He had made waves on the festival circuit with his short film Towers of Silence and his controversial debut feature, The Blood of Hussain, had been screened on Channel Four.

Born of Fire is an ambitious and unusual film, produced at a time in British TV when innovation and experimentation were still prized aims. Yet even in such a context, Born of Fire was an unusual work. Dehlavi combines the experimental, mystical and political aspects of his earlier work within a tight narrative framework and yet still manages to avoid the problem of interpretation . The film would appear to involve a conflict between light and darkness, between fire and water, between the past and the present; but beyond that it s up to the viewer to decide. Over the years there have been many attempts to nail down the film s meaning . Probably the best approach is to see that it works in a way that s much closer to that of music than of normal narrative cinema. Like all of Jamil Dehlavi's work it s highly visual. In that sense it s pure cinema, its meaning growing out of the interplay between sound, image, color and light.