Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand

Sometimes when I experience a film that is working, I am amazed at all the chance events that occurred to bring it to my soul.

Film is a collaborative endeavor, so right at the start you need the various chance meetings that bring a team together, plus all the chance occurrences in each of their pasts that make them valued collaborators. That's true with the viewer as collaborator too, but there you have the additional mechanism of market forces. That collection of boundaries and channels is profoundly fickle and arbitrary, so if an artwork finds itself to you through commercial means, its been through a cosmic pinball machine with millions of lost siblings.

Sometimes — nay often — the subject of the film is about chance as well. That's the case in the uniquely cinematic notion of noir, which imposes a notion of arbitrariness of fate on ordinary people. Usually the noir "chance" is a result of those external, collaborative constellation of chance I mentioned earlier.

Now this. People living simple lives caught up in war, decades and decades of it, that rumbles into their lives by accident. You, dear reader, may choose to see this in the context of realism, of near-documentary. That's easy to do: the actors are all refugee children from the area. Their disfigured bodies are genuine. Their faces absolute. The situation is upon us. But I cannot escape seeing this as noir shown in the large.

The key idea of noir is that the viewer by his or her existence, bends the world of the film in such a way that coincidence, chance, manipulates the citizens of that world in odd ways that matter to us. Sometimes its mere amusement, a cruel bargain. In nonfilm life, real life of pain, this happens too, as decisions are made — often in remote and protected places — that change lives, that perturb by chance.

Here we have that folded: the reality of noir politics; the politics of noir film. It works in part because the kids connect. The one false ring here is that of the two main characters, one is a teenage girl. We learn of her special misery, and that forms the core of the construction. But she is lovely, beautiful in a pure sense that is non-Arab or Kurd in nature. This film is made by a Persian about Arab Kurds. In truth, there is scant racial homogeneity among Arabs: the designation is like "Hispanic" and is the identification is linguistic. But the features of this girl are not native to the area. Its as if we had Audrey Hepburn playing a slave girl. Surely there is a Persian/Aryan subtext here. Would we connect more if the girl were more typical? It hurts to think not.

But otherwise, the thing is so true, you will be swept up in it. Orphans who survive by clearing mines, many of them limbless. Wait until you see an armless boy collecting mines with his mouth to survive. Wait until you see all this with cinematic scope, framing and intimacy when required. There's no experimentation here: here cinematic techniques are all safe, muted for effect.

Here's the interesting thing for me. The construction, story-wise, is complex. It builds and elaborates. It has many threads. It mixes delicate, human things with grand, soft and puzzling ones. It fails. By that I mean it fails in controlling the construction. It ends badly. The shape is twisted and broken. Its bad storytelling. And yet that's so apt, and so reflective of the reality it references you wonder if it was deliberate, or merely a chance.

(There's a business about "trading arms" that's a bit precious.)

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

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).

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.

The trauma of war has been an issue much covered in cinema, but in this film, we are shown the impact that it has on those who are most innocent of all – the children. The orphaned children are a range of interesting characters presented to us here, from Satellite, a sharp TV programmer to Pashow, an armless but still doggedly determined boy. The supporting children are shown as bright eyed watchers of war, eagerly awaiting it so that they can try their hand at the missiles, which, at first sounds amusing, but then escalates into something much more horrific, and we follow their misadventures through grainy camera-work, improvised dialogue and flashbacks.

The performances delivered by the children are nothing short of astounding. In the lead, Soran Ebrahim is in parts a mixture of caprice, zest and energy, and it is he who grasps our heart and makes for the first, slightly more light-hearted part of the film. In a completely different role, Avaz Latif is the film's heartbreak, and the one that endures the worst. Her performance is wordless, but she manages to portray all her deepest emotions through a look or gesture. When we delve deeper into the plot to realise exactly how much her character has suffered, it is then that the horror of war kicks in.

Turtles Can Fly is not one for the easily depressed. Truth be told, after watching it, I was still in tears for several minutes, utterly helpless and wishing that something could be done about the constant loss of innocence. Its message is blatant, and though a bleak one, presented in a harsh, disturbing war, makes a welcome change from all the Left, Right and Centre propaganda given to us in the Media. Turtles is a film that speaks for itself; no advertising needed.

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.