Las tortugas pueden volar

I was very impressed with Bahman Ghobadi's film "Turtles Can Fly." With his other two films "A Time for Drunken Horses" and "Marooned in Iraq," he has now proved himself to be an effective realist. Though like most Iranian filmmakers, the ethnic Kurdish Ghobadi may be seen as a director who is too slow for fast food cinema tastes here in America. But, he allows every character to evolve and their stories to be told. The film's two most moving sequences involve one in which the title character Satellite tries to save small female child from American land mines, and another where the main girl in the story walks towards a cliff where she will contemplate suicide. With a series of flashbacks, we quickly understand why she is on the verge of taking such a desperate leap. The film also shows hope upon the outset of the American invasion. The Kurdish citizens are clearly burned out with Saddam Hussein and desperate for a change. But, it is clear from the moments that leaflets are dropped from planes that the American forces will be there for other reasons which have nothing to do with freedom for the Kurdish people, or any Iraqis. The film is not likely to change anyone's political view of the Iraq War here domestically. Conservatives will see the Kurds' plight as a good reason why we have to stay in Iraq. Liberals will see that the promise of an invasion without hostility is an impossible one because of vast cultural differences and in the end, nothing will really change in Iraq at all. I am one who believes films can not change a person's politics, and it seems clear that Ghobadi himself has mixed feelings about the whole affair. It should be noted that Ghobadi's "A Time for Drunken Horses" was the first Kurdish-language film to be shown in my father's country, Turkey. I am not Kurdish myself, but one has to find the fact that Ghobadi broke the barrier very ironic since Turkey is actually the country with the world's largest Kurdish population and because Turkey's best known filmmaker, the late Yilmaz Guney, was of Kurdish descent. Guney is also considered to be the best filmmaker of Kurdish heritage ever. But, just as Nuri Bilge Ceylan ("Uzak/Distance") is challenging Guney's place on the mantle as far as Turkish cinema, Ghobadi might well soon be recognized as the foremost Kurdish filmmaker who ever lived, if he isn't already. However, none of these factors should take away from Guney's merits. He still deserves far international recognition for his work, but since he died in 1984, it seems that his torch has perhaps already passed on to other hands.

Among the hundred reasons I could list for you to go see this film, the first is the main character Kak "Satellite." He is truly a unique character - the likes of which I've never seen before. It is pretty impressive for a filmmaker to create something new - an on screen person so real, so normal, yet so different than anything we've seen. From the opening moments of the movie you feel you are getting to know a real human being. Satellite and the refugee children whose trust and love he's earned are the stars of this film. I don't think I've ever seen child performers better than some of these kids - if you were blown away by the children in movies like "City of God," this is a another one to look at in terms of performances. Stylistically this film is in a different category - it's a beautifully realistic movie - it's narrative unfolds effortlessly. You never feel you are watching a carefully crafted plot. You feel you are observing events that are happening - and yet it all, in retrospect, is well planned and crafted. The filmmakers and actors deserve much credit for creating a movie with its own touching and realistic voice.

Turtles Can Fly takes place in a world of hellish bleakness, a land that seems post-apocalyptic with its barren expanses, its piles of rusted military machinery, its barbed-wire and tents. It's a world that has suffered wars before - the wreckage of them is everywhere, spent shells piled like cord-wood, disabled tanks tossed together like so many discarded toys - and again it is preparing for conflict; the talk among the people is all about the great army that's coming to invade, and sweep everyone away, they believe, in a tide of fire. But this is no fictional, Mad Max world - the story takes place in a village/refugee camp on the border between Kurdish Iraq and Turkey, and the great army the people speak of is the American force come to remove Saddam Hussein from power. With a kind of superstitious dread the village elders await news from the outside, buying themselves a satellite dish so they can watch CNN (but not the forbidden channels, the "sexy and dancing"). The guy who installs the dish for them is a figure of local renown nicknamed Satellite. He's about thirteen years old, yet comports himself as an adult, speaking to the elders on equal terms with them, arguing with them, refusing to stay and translate the English-speaking news programs. Besides his dish-installation and linguistic services, Satellite also has a few other irons in the fire. His main source of money is land-mines, digging them up and selling them to dealers, and to help him he employs an army of orphaned kids, many of whom bear the marks of accidents related to their deadly trade, missing and mangled limbs.

The film revolves around this anything-but-lonely Satellite, portrayed by Soran Ebrahim as a whirlwind of words and energy, who leads his compatriots through the darkness of a world where family ties have been not just ripped apart but obliterated, where the possibility of death or dismemberment lurks around every rock. Not quite a Messiah - he's too practical for that, and too easily distracted - Satellite takes on a quality reminiscent of Kipling's Kim, the quality of precociousness forced by circumstance to evolve not only into adult competence but the kind of leadership, firm but benevolent, one would be proud to discover in a general. The great thing about Satellite is that director Bahman Ghobadi allows him to be a kid too. Newly arrived in the village are a girl and her two brothers, one of whom has had his arms blown off, the other of whom is a blind infant with a propensity to sleepwalk; Satellite takes a particular shine to the girl, a pretty but somber creature named Agrin, and tries to impress her by diving into a pond for the red fish that allegedly dwell in its silty depths (he doesn't know that the girl, traumatized by Saddam's soldiers, is far beyond being impressed by anything, and is in fact suicidal).

There are no adult characters of any importance in Turtles Can Fly; the only grown-ups are the village elders, a load of cranky, useless worry-worts, and the various shady arms dealers Satellite does business with, who care about nothing but dickering. There's no sense of traditional family structure for the lost children of this borderline world, this barren, unforgiving land with its hidden dangers, its artifacts of calamities past; there's no kind of authority anywhere, except the soldiers on the other side of the border, who the kids like to tease until they fire off their guns (a crippled boy uses his withered leg as a "gun" he pretends to shoot at a border-guard). There's a certain irony to the elders' concern over the coming invasion - they fear some terrible thing is about to befall them, failing to realize that the earth-shattering event has already happened, that the village and the camp are filled with children whose parents have been killed or fled, that their society has already been torn into a million pieces, and that a different order has begun emerging, one represented by Satellite, who speaks not only the native tongue but English too, who knows about the new ways of technology as well as the old, who doesn't dread the coming of the Americans but awaits it with excitement. Satellite and his kids represent the future, one that is fraught with peril but also promises hope, but at the same time there are darker shadings, embodied by the character of Agrin, who wishes to do away with the infant she's been saddled with, and do herself in as well.

Agrin is a mysterious character, a young woman who has been sapped of the will to live, who seems unable to feel anything anymore, who yet retains some strange magnetism, which is not lost on Satellite, who becomes entranced by her, but can never penetrate her impassive surface. Satellite embodies the essential life-force, the thing that survives in spite of everything, that shucks off misery and heartbreak and keeps plugging forward, while Agrin embodies the opposite force, which wishes to succumb to death's whispers, to fall into the fog and disappear forever. The film exists in a murky gray area between life and death, between plucky survivalism and blackest despair. The triumph of Satellite is that he keeps things moving toward tomorrow, not worrying about what kind of tomorrow is to come, but doing it because he has to, because there's no one else to do it. The film ends on an ambivalent note though: the American army has come at last, not to annihilate after all, but as the long-awaited convoy rumbles past, Satellite turns his back on it, and looks to the land instead. America, the film seems to be saying, offers no real salvation for this tortured world and its displaced people. The true salvation must come from within.

On the Kurdish refugee camp on the Iraqi-Turkish border, the boy Satellite (Soran Ebrahim) is the leader of the kids. He commands them to clear and collect American undetonated minefields in the fields to sell them in the street market and he installs antennae for the villagers. He goes with the local leader to buy a parabolic antenna to learn the news about the eminent American invasion but nobody speaks English and Satellite that knows a couple of words is assigned to translate the Fox News. When the orphans Agrin (Avaz Latif) and her armless brother Hengov (Hiresh Feysal Rahman) and the blind toddler Riga come from Halabcheh to the camp, Satellite falls in an unrequited love for Egrin. But the girl is traumatized by a cruel raid in her home, when her parents were murdered and she was raped. She wants to leave Riga behind and travel with her brother Hengov to another place, but he does not agree with her intention.

"Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand", a.k.a. "Turtles can Fly", is a heartbreaking movie with a war that is not shown on TV News where the victims are the children. The cast is formed by real refugees and is impressive the top-notch performances of the children. The title is curious since turtles lives on the water and on the land but do not fly. However, it is a metaphor since Bahman Ghobadi compares this reptile that moves from water to the land with the homeless Kurds that migrate moving forward. The fly might be a metaphor for the liberation from Saddam Hussein's regime. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Tartarugas Podem Voar" ("Turtles can Fly")

Watching this movie is an incredibly absorbing (and even physical) experience. It is amazing how the young cast (non-professionals, some of them actually lived in refugee camps along the Iraq-Turkish border) deliver such powerful performances. This is also a huge compliment to the director Bahman Gohbadi who directed the children and teens. Although the film depicts the nightmare where these children live in, it has also some comic moments, making it even more believable and real life. And what's more: the film never gets sentimental.

For me it is one of the best movies I have seen in the last few years. Not uplifting (I really needed a drink after wards) and a film you will not easily forget. On the other hand the story does provide sparkles of hope and the main characters are true survivors. So don't miss it when it plays in a theater near you! "Turtles Can Fly" won the audience award of the International Filmfestival in Rotterdam 2005 (Netherlands).