Turtles Can Fly
Philip French
Sunday January 9, 2005
The Observer
Turtles Can Fly, the first film to be made in Iraq after the fall of Saddam, is written and directed by Iranian film-maker Bahman Ghobadi. It further explores the problems of tough children attempting to survive in an adult world that he dealt with in his masterly A Time for Drunken Horses.
The earlier film concerned Kurdish children engaged in the dangerous work of smuggling goods back and forth over the heavily mined Iran-Iraq border. Here, they're living in a wretched Kurdish refugee camp near the border between Iraq and Turkey on the eve of the American invasion of 2003, and the movie is ominously framed by the suicide of a female teenage orphan.
The children survive by collecting landmines and most of them are mutilated. Their leader, nicknamed Satellite for his ability to install dishes that enable the community to keep in touch with the news, is a go-getter who keeps the group together through a combination of kindness and brutal authority. He's looking forward to the arrival of the Americans and a new way of life. You don't need to have seen A Time for Drunken Horses to know that Satellite's hopes are going to be dashed - you just need to watch the news. This is a bold, impressive film that deserves a wider audience than it's likely to get.
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