Dir.
Bahman Ghobadi, 2004, Iraq/Iran, Kurdish (Subtitles), 95 min
Cast:
Soran Ebrahim, Saddam Hossein Feysal, Abdol Rahman Karim, Avaz Latif, Hiresh Feysal Rahman, Ajil Zibari
Set in the Spring of 2003 and against the backdrop of the impending war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly tells the stories of several of the children of a small Kurdish village near the Iranian and Turkish borders. "A rough region, with rough, strong people", in the words of director Bahman Ghobadi (an Iranian Kurd himself), where news from the outside world arrive patchily and the legacy of decades of conflict is heartbreakingly visible.
Acting as a sort of leader of the village's children and teenagers, the irrepressible Kak 'Satteliet' ('Satellite') is entrusted by the villagers to carry out a variety of essential tasks, ranging from organising the teams of children who work in the minefields, picking up mines to be sold to intermediaries in the pay of international mineclearing programmes, to travelling to a nearby town to buy a satellite dish and weapons to prepare for the impending conflict. When Satellite is back with the dish it is he, thanks to the aura of polyfacetism which he himself is careful not to dispel, who's in charge of finding the English-speaking news channels through which the villagers hope to find out when and how the war will reach them. Not that, once Satellite has tuned into CNN and ABC for the village elders, President Bush's and Saddam Hussein's ringing declarations are much good as a source of information for people on the ground, so the villagers are left to their own devices to prepare. Their best recourse in case of threat seems to be to run to the nearby hill and raise their arms in the hope of being identified as noncombatants by American warplanes.
Satellite's ascendancy over the village's children is not without its tensions, though. His own terror to 'lose face' and possibly his position promptly leads him to clash with Henkov, an armless refugee from another village who travels with her beautiful younger sister and the girl's baby, doing his bit of the mineclearing by disarming mines with his mouth. Hevnor, his sister Agrin and the young child quickly become by far the most engaging characters in the film. Whether intentionally or otherwise, their story carries echoes of the ancient myths of the travellers, beautiful and tormented, rejected by the inhabitants of the lands they march through, yet, as if in compensation, gifted with strange and wondrous gifts. Hevnor can see the future, and Satellite will come to recognise his talent and use it to try and help his fellow villagers. Likewise, the tragic, slowly unfolding story of the wounded Agrin and her fatherless child is perhaps the most harrowing subplot within Turtles Can Fly .
Bahman Ghobadi crossed the border from Iran two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, in order to present his second feature Marooned in Iraq. As he has explained in interviews, he was impressed by 'the handicapped children without arms, the open weaponry and mines markets.' Four months later the screenplay for what would become the first film shot in Iraq after the fall of Saddam was ready on Ghobadi's desk.
Among the undeniable virtues of Turtles Can Fly are the beautiful photography and the spellbinding quality of the war-torn, desolate landscapes, littered not only with mines but with the wreckage of countless military vehicles abandoned in the course of many campaigns. The movie has been presented at a plethora of international contests, including the 40th London Film Festival and the 52nd San Sebastian Film Festival, where it won the prestigious Golden Shell (Concha de Oro). A shame that the slightly wooden script does not fully realise the promise of the underlying premise, and the tendency of the amateur children actors to scream, cry and pull faces can be a real turn-off in what's essentially a passion-rich project, conceived from an unflinching determination to bear witness to the realities of war-ravaged Iraq.
Miguel Sopena
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