Review by Luis Dechtiar
July 9, 2005

TURTLES CAN FLY (2004)

Rarely do films about war and contemporary world affairs reach international audiences with the immediacy and urgency of Turtles Can Fly.  At the same time, this Iranian/Iraqi film by writer/director Bahman Ghobadi speaks to us from a surprising angle, at first neither confronting nor condoning the political agendas of either opposing side in the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government.  Instead, it settles quietly into a Kurdish refugee camp in the border of Turkey and Iraq sometime before the invasion.  It then recreates with sincerity the psychological and physical state of a particular people who – despite being affected severely – remain neglected amidst the mainstream controversies of our time.

The camp is apparently run entirely by orphan children.  There are adults around, men who watch television or manage little businesses, and women who collect water from the river, but the vast majority of the industrious population are boys: skilled hard workers, energetically following the directions of their leader, Satellite (Soran Ebrahim).  Satellite is resourceful, a ruthless negotiator, concerned only with his followers, impatient and passionate, with an underlying sense of desperation – a radiant spirit suppressed by his circumstances.  He is the one who provides television for the town by exchanging radios for a satellite dish; he makes announcements over loudspeakers, directing the masses during moments of crisis.  “I am responsible for the children in the barracks” he tells one of the elders, “I don’t have time to translate the news for you!”  Satellite’s rival is Hangao (Hiresh Feysal Rahman) known as The Boy With No Arms, a more mature, wise and soft-spoken leader who directs the gathering of land-mines, disarming them himself with his lips.  He and his sister Agrin lost their parents when their home was raided, and are now left to care for a small child whose parenthood is unclear.  One haunting scene shows the child calling for his father into the echoing interiors of empty bomb shells that are disposed of into a field, shells which the children now gather for one trading purpose or another.

Ghobadi’s choice to make all of his protagonists under the age of 15 lends a genuine sense of opinion, humor and suffering to the characters.  The most endearing character, Shirko (Ajil Zibari), weeps when he disappoints Satellite because he is entirely faithful to the only cause he has ever known.  In one particularly powerful scene, when Satellite is injured in bed, Shirko offers him a gift he was able to purchase from Baghdad:  it is a metallic arm, supposedly from Saddam Hussein’s fallen statue, an image that seems almost too recent to possibly be recreated in the Iraqi fictional cinema and screened in Western theaters.  Also striking is the physical immediacy of the film due to its realistic (if not real) settings.  Two of the main actors actually have missing limbs, and the youngest is at least partially blind.  We wonder how much else is true about the lives of the Iraqi children who participate in the story so intensely.  Near the end, US Army soldiers march through the camp as though caught incidentally by the cameras.  They rush by, of course, oblivious to the unfolding drama of Satellite and The Boy With No Arms.

Most saddening is the plight of the lead female character, Agrin, played so beautifully by young Avaz Latif.  While her brother is benevolent toward the child under their care, Agrin is not.  We slowly discover the reasons for her misery and utter spiritual devastation.  The significant damage of war is not what it does to leaders and their economies, but how it hinders the progress and the immense spiritual potential of entire generations.  At the heart of this film are the children who undoubtedly lend their stories, and who really exist, simultaneous to its making, and still exist as we watch them from across continents.  Turtles Can Fly never fails to remind us of that, with every unassuming frame.

Turtles Can Fly is an IFC Films release, date: 2/18/2005.  Rated PG-13 for violence, disturbing images and mature thematic material, all involving children.
Country: Iran/Iraq
Language: Kurdish with English subtitles.

 

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