Carl Nilsson-Polias

The ceaseless woes of the Kurdish people have been far from unrecognised in the past decade. Their persecution at the hands of Iraq, Turkey and Iran (the countries which the unofficial territory of Kurdistan overlaps) has been unabatedly awful, to say the least. So, it is with the weightiest of historical baggage that Bahman Ghobadi’s film, set in Kurdistan before and during the latest American invasion, comes to our screens. Yet, the film stands up as a sublime and original cinematic vision.

Turtles Can Fly is a film based on children, somewhat in the vein of Lord of the Flies or the more recent City of God. Our protagonist is Satellite, named so for his remarkable capacity to source satellite dishes for Kurdish villages desperate for international news that might herald the liberating forces of “Mr Bush”. Satellite is the best advertisement for the entrepreneurial spirit in a free-market economy that I’ve ever come across—his pragmatic approach to the desperation of his situation is to organise refugee children into work-gangs clearing landmines that they can sell or barter with to provide themselves with a livelihood. Clearly we’re not talking about the Brady Bunch kids here and it is a credit to Ghobadi’s direction that the children’s performances are both engaging and charming without treading into the mire of arch cuteness or naiveté.

The film’s tone is at once affrontingly authentic—dystopic landscapes of obsolete and burnt out munitions—and magically surreal. Ghobadi knows better than to give the viewers an overly earnest and detached documentary style. The horrifying subject matter and remarkably beautiful and unsympathetic landscapes of grey mountains and mine-infested fields demand a heightened style. There is nothing quotidian about this story, or at least there shouldn’t be, but this is of course an all too real everyday life for too many people. Ghobadi invests the story with a thrilling level of metaphor and allegory. There is no cheap symbolism, just carefully and subtly created elements and storylines that in their content and execution parallel the enticing but rapacious poetry of Ovid.

In many respects, it’s amazing that this film was made at all. I first saw the film at the Melbourne Film Festival three years ago when Ghobadi introduced the film (it was the Australian premiere) and explained that, being made only two months after the fall of Saddam, the entire film crew had to enter Iraq illegally and were under constant threat in the generally anarchic post-war situation. Fortunately, they had forty peshmerga as bodyguards but what they need now is the support of audiences—the film was entirely independently made—and, in a stroke of good fortune for Ghobadi and prospective audiences alike, Turtles Can Fly is now available on DVD. See it.