Turtles might fly ...
Turtles Can Fly
Written and directed by Bahman Ghobadi
Iran-Iraq co-production
Palace Cinemas from August 18
REVIEW BY LACHLAN MALLOCH
Turtles Can Fly is a precious film. Its anti-war message about the enduring suffering of the Kurdish people in Iraq makes you wish everyone else would see it. Its sensitive, measured pace and heart-wrenching emotional impact made me wonder why I ever considered missing it.
Kurdish-Iranian writer/director Bahman Ghobadi, known for A Time for Drunken Horses, has managed to complete the first feature film to come out of Iraq since the Anglo-American invasion of 2003.
That this film is being exhibited at all should make progressives cheer. Ghobadi took three months to secure approval simply to film scenes in Iraqi Kurdistan and had to virtually self-finance the production.
At a time when Iraqi cultural heritage is being destroyed — 10,000 sites of priceless value to civilisation were recently declared at risk of destruction — it is heartening to see a new cultural artefact produced, against the odds.
Also, Kurdistan is a place where, Ghobadi says, "we have no actors". Hence his use of an entire cast of non-professionals in Turtles Can Fly — not that you'd know it from the compellingly credible performances. In this way it reminded me of Ken Loach's great "fictional" works that have more social resonance than many "factual" documentaries.
The film's setting may seem small — a Kurdish village on northern Iraq's Turkish border, in the last weeks of Saddam Hussein's rule — but its emotional and historical scope is considerably larger.
The Kurds are the world's largest national group without a state, their numbers running into the millions. While Turtles Can Fly doesn't really deal with the Kurdish struggle for national self-determination, it's enough to remind us that there is one. Hopefully it will, however briefly, puncture the saccharine veneer of today's popular culture.
The story follows the lives of a group of children trying to survive on the margins of society. Satellite, virtually the village mayor, has a knack for obtaining, installing and fixing communications equipment. One-legged Pashao is Satellite's loyal, compassionate lieutenant. Hengov is an armless boy who is more useful for telling the future than the fuzzy television reception in the village, while his sister Agrin carries a harrowed expression on her face and a helpless blind little boy (Rega) on her back everywhere she goes.
These resourceful "children" delicately pick their way through fields of landmines, perversely providing them with an income if they can manage to prise them free unexploded, which they do with amazing dexterity. Even armless Hengov disarms expertly with his mouth.
Ghobadi says that he "wanted to make a film against the war", but one comes away from seeing this film with a much more universal sense of enduring oppression and survival. Perhaps this is because of Ghobadi's complete avoidance of any direct documentary-style polemic, coupled with his sensitive storytelling and the film's measured, gradually quickening pace.
"Just as the world TV networks were announcing the end of the war, I began to make a film whose leading stars were neither Bush, nor Saddam, nor any other dictators. Those people had been the media stars the world over. Nobody mentioned the Iraqi people. There hadn't been a single shot of the Iraqis.
"I wish to dedicate my film to all the innocent children in the world — the casualties of the policies of dictators and fascists."
In both subtle and explosive ways, Ghobadi leaves us in no doubt that the Iraqis are far from liberated by this latest chapter in the violent history of their region.
There are several themes in Turtles Can Fly, the strongest of which is survival amidst enduring oppression.
In the director's words: "Once the film is over, you realise that the past is bitter, that the present is bitter, and that you should look up to no-one but yourself for the future.
"Powerful foreigners have no intention to create a heaven for us. As far as they're concerned, they are exploiting us ..."
Ghobadi's most poignant visual expression of this is the blind toddler Rega, slowly making his way alone down a cold, shadowed hillside into the field below that is strewn with live landmines.
Chinese director Zhang Yimou says that you know you've seen a great film if a single, powerful image stays burned onto your memory for years afterwards. I think Turtles Can Fly will do this to its audience and much more.
[Green Left Weekly is holing a screening of Turtles Can Fly at 6.30pm on August 18 at the Palace Cinema, Norton Street, Sydney. Phone (02) 9690 1977.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 17, 2005.
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