Turtles Can Fly
Studio: IFC Films
Rated: NOT RATED
Website: http://www.ifcfilms.com/ifcfilms?CAT0=3127&CAT1=6266&AID=10507&CLR=red&BCLR=
Cast: Soran Ebrahim, Avaz Latif, Hirsh Feyssal
Director: Bahman Ghobadi
Screenwriter: Bahman Ghobadi
Music Score: Houssein Alizadeh
WorkNameSort: Turtles Can Fly
Our Rating: 3.00

There are moments in Turtles Can Fly when two youngsters, just barely teens, feel the pull of natural attraction – the unexpected kind that’s all the sweeter for it. But there’s not much beyond the touchstone of that familiar ache that the viewer can share with the cursed band of children who populate Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s (A Time for Drunken Horses) dismal landscape. What goes on in his Iraqi refugee camp on the Turkish border is horrific and not life as we know it at all.

Ghobadi’s camera unsparingly captures this mangled team of pathetic war orphans; parts of their bodies are missing or mutilated by mines and other disasters common in this culture fraught with political, religious and ethnic clashes. They are led by the bite-sized entrepreneurial and paternal spirit known as Satellite (Soran Ebrahim) – so called because of his worldly ways with a metal dish, which grant him powerful status with the village elders, as does his working knowledge of the English language. (“Come on! OK! George Bush!)

Even in their remote outpost, the elders know that U.S. President George W. Bush is about to declare war on their country any moment and they are desperate for news, even going so far in their search for clear reception to risk exposing their Muslim sensibilities to the “prohibited channels.” There is an amusing scene – or as amusing as it gets in this film – where digital images of the Playboy Channel seemingly come out of nowhere into the blown-out hole that serves as a home to the graybeards who gather, helpless.

Satellite and his irrepressible crew hard-earn their money by digging out land mines and selling them to dealers who sell them to dealers who sell them to the government. The bespectacled boy leader is charismatic and savvy but full of heart, and his eyes are drawn to a struggling Kurdish sister and brother – he with flippers for arms and a gift for prognostication – who care for a misbegotten toddler whose miserable cries become too familiar to us. The sister, Agrin (Avaz Latif), is hauntingly beautiful; her face as vacant as her emotions, which disappeared the night her parents were murdered.

The Americans do finally arrive, and Saddam Hussein is toppled. But this is a tragedy, not a love story. And those few stolen glances between Satellite and Agrin are all we are left with that feels human in this painful, despair-filled film.

This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2005.