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Turtles Can Fly

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'Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand' (TURTLES CAN FLY) takes your breath away. Not only is the story by writer/director Bahman Ghobadi timely, it is one of the most devastatingly real examinations of the people of Iraq in the days before the American preemptive attack: it is more real because the entire story is told through the eyes of children.

The action takes place in Kurdistan, Iraq at the Turkish border. The temporary refugee camp in the hills is occupied by children who make money by gathering live mines and used shells from the military conditions under Saddam Hussein's rule. They struggle to make deals for a satellite dish so that they can provide coverage of the war for the elders (they are not allowed to watch Hussein's forbidden channels!), they form rival groups for the monetary aspects of weapons gathering, and they rely on a leader by the name of Satellite (Soran Ebrahim) who appears to be the oldest of the children. His 'associates' are the crippled boy Pashow (Saddam Hossein Feysal) able to run as fast as even Satellite on a bicycle with just one leg and a crutch; Shirkooh (Ajil Zibari) whose tears flow easily; Hengov (Hiresh Feysal Rahman) who lost his arms to the land mines and has the ability to foresee the future; and the mysterious Agrin (Avaz Latif) the sole girl who with Hengov is caring for a blind two year orphan Riga (Abdol Rahman Karim).

The children, all orphans, are on the watch for war they know will come, watch and listen for the Americans to arrive, and struggle for survival under Satellite's organized control. Agrin wishes to escape it all, pleads with Hengov to return to their home, but Hengov will not leave the child Riga. As the tension mounts tragedies occur, touching all of the children. But the manner in which the children finally observe as Hussein's statue topples and as the American troops distribute 'hopeful' fliers from helicopters, events bringing an end to their temporary refuge camp status, is heart-wrenchingly portrayed.

The film is full of passion. The young 'actors' are splendid: how Ghobadi found such children to play tough parts in such a wholly naturalistic way is a true feat of genius. This is a powerful, disturbing, yet ultimately beautiful film that deserves everyone's close attention. In Kurdish with English subtitles. Highly recommended! Grady Harp, October 05

On the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, Kurdish refugees wait with hope and trepidation. Hope, because they have suffered so much under Saddam, trepidation because their liberation promises little improvement. Thirteen year old "Satellite", so called for his expertise installing satellite dishes, is the boss of the refugee children. Most are orphans, many are crippled by the mines which they dig up to sell to the U.N. Life is very hard and uncertain; for sport, the boldest boys taunt the Turkish soldiers manning the border posts. Satellite genuinely cares for his "kids", but has a rivalry with the "Armless Boy," a newcomer to the camp and seemingly a psychic. However, he finds the Armless Boy's pretty sister intriguing. The girl, Agrin, is aloof and haunted by horrific memories, and is not interested in Satellite. Eventually, the US forces arrive. There is no anti-American sentiment in this film, but neither are the Americans portrayed as heroic liberators. In fact, they seem oblivious to the Kurds. The images of the tanks rumbling through the villages, the grim-faced, armed soldiers jogging past the ragged, barefoot urchins are almost surreal. The refugees' hectic life continues uninterrupted by their presence. Agrin's personal drama culminates in the horror foreshadowed at the film's start. "Turtles Can Fly" has its moments of humor but it is not a feel-good film, and the fates of the characters will leave you disturbed. I recommend this film because it is a timely portrayal of current events and an intimate look into a mostly unknown culture. The joint Iraqi-Iranian film features English subtitles.

Turtles Can Fly was a joint Iraq- Iran production. The language spoken is Kurdish, but it has English subtitles.
The film is set in Iraqi Kurdistan, primarily in a refugee town near the Turkish border. The story follows a boy in his early teens, Satellite, so named for his ability to set up satellite dishes, a much-wanted commoditiy in Iraq preceding the US invasion. Satellite is always wanted in the local villages; he has authority even with the elders, and is a father figure to the children (many of them orphans) and finds them work, mostly digging up mines and selling them to the UN.
At the beginning of the movie, Satellite mets Agrin, a pretty but deeply troubled girl. She is accompanied by her brother, who lost both of his arms to a land mine but has the mysterious ability to see into the future. Also with them is a toddler, whose relationship to Agrin and her brother is not revealed until later.
Agrin's brother, known as the 'armless boy' has been having a series of disturbing premonitions; the war is coming closer and closer. Satellite works frantically to prepare the regugee camp for the invasion. He also attempts to befriend Agrin, and in the course of the movie we discover disturbing and troubling things about this strange family's haunted past.
Turtles Can Fly does not, as some expected, portray the United States in a negative light. However, it makes a very clear statement that our self-appointed position as liberators is skewed and false. Many scenes reinforce this; Satellite will be racing around after one tragedy or another, and the US tanks just roll past, indifferent.
This is not a feel-good movie. It is disturbing, haunting, troubling, and heart-breaking. However, it also opens a window on a culture few people know about: Iraq under Saddam, specifically, the lives of war-torn children in pre-invasion Kurdistan. This movie gives names and faces to Iraqis, and portrays the US as children on the ground saw it. It is also frequently witty and endearing.
All in all, this is an intense, eye-opening, and very alive movie. It captures war from a perspective often ignored, and gives breath to the population we hear so much about on the news. It handles the children's lives in a restrained and sometimes slightly surreal manner, but turns a far-seeing, sweeping eye on the surrounding area, and the great tides of conflict that shaped and changed a region.

We often try to romanticize war. Sometimes we select the other side of the coin and do our best to remove ourselves from it altogether. 'Turtles Can Fly' doesn't allow us to pick either option. In it, we see war through the eyes of the innocent, and what we see is hell.

Here are some of the pictures that Bahman Ghobadi, the director of the film, paints for us: a young man without arms who has lost them doing the only trade that once afforded him - picking up landmines; a beautiful pre-teen who's been a victim of rape from a group of ravenous soldiers; a blind infant who's hope is placed in the fate of two teenaged strangers. These are the characters who allow us to see the war as they see it, and the picture is not nice, sweet, or glorious. The result is a feeling that will leave you detesting war more than ever, regardless of your political or personal views on any war the world has been engaged in. Those walls built by pro or anti agendas will begin to fall, and you will lose yourself as you too attempt to emotionally climb out of the experience you've just been a part of.

An eye-opening experience that I would recommend to anyone who is mature enough to stomach it.

"Turtles can Fly" is a drama set in Kurdistan (on the Turkey-Iraq border) shortly before the Americans invade Iraq in 2003. Satellite is the ringleader of the refugee camp's hoards of orphaned children, who earn a meager living picking live landmines out of fields. Many are missing hands, arms, or legs. At the beginning of the film, the town's villagers are trying to install ancient antennas to catch word of when the war will begin, but Satellite rightly predicts that only a satellite dish will work for picking up foreign channels. Satellite's sidekick Pashow has lost a leg to the mines, and hobbles frantically behind Satellite, trying to keep up as he barks orders to assign his "workers" to new mine fields. The children sell the mines to arms dealers, who sell them to the UN.

We soon meet Agrin and Hengov, brother and sister, who are displaced and live in the refugee camp. Their parents were murdered by the Iraqi army, and tagging along with them is their little brother Riga, who, although blind, is a very intelligent, sensitive toddler. Hengov has lost both arms to a mine, and works alone, not talking to the other village and refugee children. It is said that he has the ability to predict the future. His beautiful, haunted, suicidal sister begrudgingly cares for Riga, who she lets wander away at night. Satellite is attracted to Agrin, attempting to impress her by carrying water for her, diving into a haunted pond to look for red fish, and telling her that he's been looking for a girl like her all his life, but she just walks away, back to the misery of her tent and her lot in life.

The war eventually reaches the town, and we see American troops rumbling through, but more and more tragedy occurs to the most defenseless: the children, living in mud-soaked, filthy camps, who spend their days picking through shell casings and unexploded land mines.

The ending is stark and powerful, and director Ghobadi blends mysticism with gritty realism, the young cast all non-professional actors. His distrust of the West is portrayed in scenes that show "forbidden channels" on the satellite, music videos and such from Germany, and the inaccurate reporting from CNN. When the village elders try to force Satellite to translate, he just says "they're saying it will rain tomorrow," but later in the film, we find that he does know a bit of English and inadvertently teaches it to the other children.

This is a film full of disturbing images: violence, rape, maiming and suicide of children, so sensitive viewers beware. It is slow to start off, but is an ultimately rewarding journey of the horrors of war and the fate of the marginalized, orphaned children that war produces.

Heartbreaking. Directed by Bahman Ghobadi, "Turtles Can Fly" is set in a Kurdish refugee camp on the border of Iraq and Turkey, immediately prior to the US invasion of Iraq. The film focuses on the lives of three orphans, Soran, a.k.a. ''Satellite" (Soran Ebrahim), Hyenkov a.k.a. "The Boy with No Arms" (Hirsh Feyssal), and Hyenkov's sister, Agrin (Avaz Latif). Satellite, a teenager, is the leader of the camp orphans, who make money by disarming land mines and then reselling the mines to arms dealers.

All of the children in this film suffer from devastation wrought by the adult world: a world of war. Agrin, raped by Iraqi soldiers as a girl, is now an adolescent and a mother to a blind toddler, Riga, that she pretends is her brother. The children are living adult lives -- selling war machinery & setting up satellite dishes, parenting or providing camp leadership - but the events that led to their transformation into pseudo adults has also left them maimed and psychically damaged.

An amazingly subtle, bleak, poetically beautiful AND completely devastating film about the wages of war.

Few films can match the dazzling visuals and heart-wrenching storyline of Ghobadi's unforgettable Oscar-nominated drama, which spins a tender, engrossing tale about the costs of war from the perspective of three Kurdish children. Newcomer Ebrahim is completely fearless playing the likable, charismatic Satellite, while nonpros Latif and Feyssal are devastating as war-brutalized siblings toting a handicapped, unwanted child born of rape. Harsh yet compassionate, "Turtles" is filled with potent, resonant images--a blind toddler seated in a mine field, Agrin swigging kerosene to numb a toothache, the maimed Henkov defusing a mine with his teeth. A beautiful, hypnotic work of film poetry.

****1/2

It would be hard to imagine a more pertinent and relevant film than "Turtles Can Fly," an Iran/Iraq co-production that, like a modern day version of "Forbidden Games," looks at the horrors of war through the eyes of its most helpless and innocent victims - children. Set in a poor village located in Kurdistan, just a few steps from Iraq's barb-wired border with Turkey, "Turtles Can Fly" begins right before the American invasion of that Arab country in the spring of 2003. Many of the children of the village are orphaned refugees who earn money by finding, defusing, and then selling the many active land mines that lie strewn across the barren countryside. This is literally how most of them make their living. The main character is a teenaged boy who goes by the name of Satellite (one of his many duties is to hook up satellite dishes for the villagers' TV's) who, much like a pint-sized Fagin, sends his gang of kids - many crippled and missing limbs - out on daily missions to forage for mines. Another major character is a young girl who was raped by the soldiers who killed her family and who now carries the burden of "shame" that comes with having had a child out of wedlock and whose actions in this realm ultimately lay the groundwork for the story`s final tragedy.

Given its harsh subject matter, "Turtles Can Fly" - which features wonderful performances from a group of children, some of whom have themselves lost limbs to landmines - is not always easy to watch, but there is a surprising amount of humor in the movie, as well as a tender-hearted compassion for its characters that makes it a compelling, moving experience. Much of the humor comes from the near-surreal juxtaposition of a Medieval existence and mindset with devices of modern technology such as trucks, television sets, satellite dishes etc. The protagonist's no-nonsense, sardonic approach to life and the people around him also generates some much-needed humor.

But, ultimately, this is a poignant, haunting movie that opens up a world largely unfamiliar to those of us living out our far more comfortable lives in the West. The movie is basically a series of slice-of-life vignettes that help us to understand the appalling conditions under which people in that part of the world are forced to survive. Yet even as they eke out some sort of existence against the greatest of odds, these youngsters still find time to laugh and play and fall in love, a fact that is bound to strike a responsive chord in viewers the world over. For the film is a heartbreaking and vivid reminder that when adults play at their games of war, it is the children of the world who suffer the most.

This terribly moving story of a lost generation, mutilated, orphaned, haunted, and overlooked, is unforgettable in its uncompromising look at the children who have been brutalized in Iraq. The idea that these children are actually acting falls away early on as one is swept up with the amazing performances of Satellite, the hardened and yet compassionate leader of a large pack of orphans, Agrin, the haunted, beautiful young girl he admires and tries desperately to impress, and Agrin's armless brother, a victim of a land mine and a mystic who can see into the future. There is also the bastard child, Agrin's son, I assume, whom she hates the sight of. This sad child is like an albatross around her neck and is a constant reminder of the horror she has suffered, long before the arrival of the Americans.
All the characters are swept along by the news of the impending arrival of the Americans into Iraq, putatively to take away the people's suffering. Ironically, the last shot of the movie shows the clean, white healthy Americans running right by Satellite and his friend, completely ignoring them. This quiet image is a perfect commentary on the war itself.
This movie puts a child's face on a brutal land and an awful war. Be prepared to cry more than laugh, and to come away feeling anger and despair.

On the Iraqi-Kurd border, just before the start of the Iraq war, refugees gather. They are mainly comprised by an army of parentless children, many maimed by explosions. Their leader is "Satellite" -- a nerdy and obnoxiously assertive techie who finds jobs for his dozens of young charges. One day, they may be removing mines from a farmer's field. Another day, they are holding wires across a hillside, hoping for better TV reception.

Into their midst comes a sullen young trio -- an armless teen, his 12-year-old sister, and a 2-year old they refer to as "the child." There is an aura of unspeakable loss about them. The sister continually contemplates suicide as she passes ponds or cliffs. Her older brother attempts to get her to care for the child, whom she resolutely avoids. The trio is mostly isolated from the rest of the children, until the brother's ability to tell the future attracts Satellite's interest.

The movie is mostly well shot, its stunningly desolate landscapes echoing the lives of the characters. Some of the cinematography is shockingly beautiful -- an underwater shot of an armless boy swimming in a murky pool being one. The movie is also unspeakably depressing. The sight of so many (apparently real) limbless children is not the stuff of happy endings. At its core, this is a film about the constant fight for survival in a stark and unhappy situation. There are those like Satellite who wheedle and bluster their way from one day to the next, and there are those who follow. There are those who struggle with their inner demons as well as the ones conjured by warring adults. There are no happy endings for the children in the film, but only another day of stubbornly coping with a brutal existence.

"Turtles Can Fly" is sometimes confusing but often captivating. The story it tells is fresh, if horrifying. For those in war-ravaged lands, existence can be a series of tragic events strung together with pointless hardship. It's a tough message to hear.