Documentaries give a non-fiction account of the world today, but even documentaries can give various shadings to “the truth.” Sometimes it’s up to fiction to take us directly to the heart of painful places and times.
One such fictional movie is “Turtles Can Fly,” a new one from the Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi. This director made an impression with his debut feature, “A Time for Drunken Horses,” and he has returned again to the subject of Kurdish children.
The setting is Iraq, on the eve of war in 2003. In a ramshackle village in Kurdistan, the elders are anxious to see TV news of the impending war, although Saddam Hussein has censored anything like real news.
The elders rely on a 13-year-old boy, nicknamed “Satellite,” who seems to run the town. He knows how to rig up a satellite that will bring in the prohibited channels.
He also leads a band of children in what appears to be the town’s main economic engine: collecting land mines and selling them at the market. Satellite has a well-organized, all-business approach to this incredibly dangerous activity. He simply sends his troops out in the field on their hands and knees, where they skillfully disarm the bombs.
Satellite, who favors big clunky eyeglasses and a baseball cap, is one of the great characters in recent movie memory. He’s smart, iron-willed, impatient with others, and adored by his underlings. If he’d had the luck to be born in New Jersey, he’d be the next Donald Trump, but he’s in Kurdistan, so he’s digging up land mines and trading them for guns.
This kid is intrigued by a trio of newcomers: a boy who has lost his arms, his sister, and the sister’s baby. The sister doesn’t look more than 15, but she has had the baby after being raped by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers (an event re-told in brutal flashback).
Satellite likes the girl, and finds the armless boy a mystical character – rumor has it he can foretell events. This could be handy to a businessman such as Satellite, and it would be nice to have advance notice about the Americans rolling in.
“Turtles Can Fly,” the first movie made in Iraq since the war began, locks us in at the level of these children, and dispenses with issue-mongering on the subject of the war.
Because Ghobadi doesn’t tell us how to feel, the movie remains a disquieting experiencing, more on the side of poetry than politics. Except, that is, for the political reality that under a dictatorship, and in times of war, kids are going to bear an inordinate burden of horror. The image of 10-year-olds crawling through dirt to carefully disarm a mine is a hard one to shake, either as reality or metaphor.
“Turtles Can Fly” looks at the Iraq war through some children’s eyes.
“Turtles Can Fly” HHH
Waiting for war: In the days before war broke out in 2003, a village in Kurdish Iraq anxiously awaits the event. Director Bahman Ghobadi creates a memorable movie character in a 13-year-old wheeler-dealer who disarms and sells land mines. (In Kurdish, with English subtitles.)
Rated: Not rated; probably PG-13 for violence, subject matter.
Now showing: Uptown.
“Turtles Can Fly” HHH
Waiting for war: In the days before war broke out in 2003, a village in Kurdish Iraq anxiously awaits the event. Director Bahman Ghobadi creates a memorable movie character in a 13-year-old wheeler-dealer who disarms and sells land mines. (In Kurdish, with English subtitles.)
Rated: Not rated; probably PG-13 for violence, subject matter.
Now showing: Uptown.
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