Turtles Can Fly Bahman Ghobadi Iraq/Iran 2004
Famous for being the first indigenous film to emerge from Iraq since the second Gulf war, Turtles Can Fly is Bahman Ghobadi’s third feature. Ghobadi, the one man Kurdish film industry for international audiences, debuted with the heart rendingly poignant yet dull art-house favourite A Time for Drunken Horses in 2000 and subsequently directed Songs of My Motherland
Although opening with dense expositive dialogue, Turtles Can Fly soon blossoms into a rotten desert rose of a film, a stirring work full of jarring images of Kurdish refugees caught on the edge of the conflict. Adopting a feel-good vibe at the start, the film could almost be a children’s caper movie as a mob of village kids and orphans all follow Kak Satellite, a mechanically minded leader who marshals them. In the quiet build-up to war the Kurds understandably want to know what’s going on in the wider world. The opening scene depicts this thirst for knowledge far superiorly than the clumsy introductory sentences, as gangs of Kurds swivel mounted aerials on a nearby ridge desperately trying to pick up a signal in this remote part of the world. Cue Satellite the kid who knows how to install satellite. On the trip to buy the hardware he hears word of a boy who can prophesise the future. The boy exists and arrives in the village challenging Satellite’s technical ability to receive the present.
Any sense of childish or adolescent adventure is gradually eroded with Ghobadi’s strong realisation of his setting. The children here could be members of the doomed Children’s Crusade because Satellite’s mob clear mines for money. In one playfully gruesome scene the acceptance of just how dangerous living on the Turkish-Iraqi border can be is impressed by one of Satellite’s lieutenants. Already disturbed by children disarming mines with their teeth and the conspicuous minority of children with crutches or amputations, the child taunts a Turkish border guard by pretending to shoot at him with a mimicked rifle. Except the prop he uses is his distorted maimed leg. Small details like this litter and sour the scenario. Later an orphan plays in a discarded artillery shell dump echoing questions for his dead parents through the empty tubes. Away from him more children unload shells from a truck. Some are still live... Within this kind of environment it is unsurprising that the other central character is a suicidal young girl. Traumatised by her past and her brother’s ability to foretell the future, the films starts with one of her flirtations with mortality and shows several more. In a brutal back-story revealed later one fully understands why she has had enough. Despite her brother’s gift life is sadistically predatory and the American liberators who cameo at the end are shown marching from right to left across the frame leaving all this mess as it was.
