Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha ham parvaz mikonand)(2004)
Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi (A Time For Drunken Horses) places Turtles Can Fly in Kurdistan, that part of northern Iraq inhabited by the much-betrayed Kurdish people–betrayed both by Saddam and, to its infinite discredit, by the United States. Saddam poison-gassed the people and mined the land of Kurdistan in his megalomaniacal efforts at ethnic purification and oilfield domination. The U.S. broke promises of support for the Kurds.
The time is just before the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. Kurdistan, near the unfriendly Turkish border is already a war zone. Venture too near the fenced border and border guards open fire. The small town seems dominated by a refugee tent camp and a great many of those refugees are children–often children missing an arm or a leg as a result of the omnipresent land mines planted like so many seeds throughout the area.
There’s no water or power and there are no schools. Of greatest concern, it seems, is the lack of television–the village leaders want news of the impending invasion. Soran, nicknamed "Satellite," is a highly resourceful thirteen-year-old, nicknamed for his ability to obtain satellite dishes and set up villages for TV reception. (But not, the elders insist, stations that broadcast forbidden material.)
Soran is also a natural leader. He has organized the other children and sends them out to the minefields to recover mines which are then sold to a Kurd dealer. The proceeds are used for the children, including the purchase of gas masks to defend against the invasion. There is something painfully poignant about seeing a young child using a gas mask as a toy.
The other leading characters are a family of three–a clairvoyant brother with no arms, his beautiful and ineffably sad sister (with whom Soran falls in love), and an infant child whose relationship is defined in a flashback well into the film.
Children, with the least control over their destinies, are the most vulnerable, the innocents of wartime. The tragedy of these lives is moving, but, to some small extent the tragedy is counterbalanced by Ghobadi in showing that somehow humanity survives in these kids–the ways they manage to cope, the courage they muster to do what must be done, the ways that they care for one another.
Acted entirely by nonprofessionals and elegantly filmed, Turtles Can Fly touches on both the best and the worst in human behavior. At once gritty, primitive and highly sophisticated, it is a highly political film that looks at the victims, not at the perpetrators. When the Americans do arrive, they are stone-faced automatons, oblivious to the people around them. The children see them as the enemy to resist. What else are they to think in a world where their people have been betrayed on all sides?
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