Les tortues volent aussi

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.

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.

It's an excellent work Ghobadi did. When the movie finished I couldn't leave the chair for the next 10 minutes. I ran to the toilet to finish my crying. It reminded me of how little I'm aware what's going on in the world, even next door to where I was born and my own childhood.It reminded me that the humanity in me hasn't died yet but needed to be woken up. It's about a tough life where the kids are in charge of adults and more mature than them. The movie gives a clear picture of a bunch on refugee Kurds on their own land. Ghobadi cleverly draws the picture of a disaster in the Middle East: The Kurds, who has been on that land for thousand of years but still don't own a flag and their struggles between Turkey, Iraq,Iran and America.

Any one, who is interested in a bit of information about what's going on over there as well as the other problems in the area should see this movie. A black comedy in some ways when you can't help smiling while crying.