The first film to be made in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the devastating Turtles Can Fly is set in a Kurdish refugee camp on the Iraqi-Turkish border just before the US invasion in spring 2003. Director Bahman Ghobadi concentrates on a handful of orphaned children and their efforts to survive the appalling conditions: there's the entrepreneurial Satellite (Soran Ebrahim), the armless clairvoyant Henkov (Hirsh Feyssal), and his traumatised sister Agrin (Avaz Latif), who herself is responsible for a blind toddler.
Dedicated according to the Kurdish Ghobadi "to all the innocent children in the world - the casualties of the policies of dictators and fascists", Turtles Can Fly vividly immerses the viewer in the nightmarish realities of daily existence in this makeshift community that's located within a forbidding natural landscape. There's no running water or electricity, the fear of gas attacks is palpable, and kids use their bare-hands to defuse land mines in the surrounding fields, which they then trade for machine guns at a market.
"STARK POWER OF ITS CINEMATIC IMAGERY"
As with Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards, which unfolded in a similar no-man's land near the Iraqi border, this is a film whose strength derives from the stark power of its cinematic imagery. One long-shot shows what appears to be livestock grazing near to a jagged tree: the close-up reveals that the animals are in fact youngsters, who are collecting mines on their hands and knees. Flashbacks reconstruct the dreadful suffering endured by Agrin at the hands of Saddam's soldiers, whilst Henkov's dream sequences portend the film's final tragedy.
Using an entirely non-professional cast, Ghobadi doesn't ignore the gestures of tenderness and humanity displayed by his brutalised characters: there's even an element of black comedy in the fact that after Satellite's resourceful efforts to acquire the necessary dish, the village elders can't understand a word of the English-language news bulletin. And Ghobadi also rails against the American 'liberators', who drop leaflets proclaiming "we are here to take away your sorrow", only then to drive straight through the human chaos in search of their next military target.
In Kurdish with English subtitles.
Turtles Can Fly (2005)
