Turtles Can Fly

“Set on the Kurdistan border days before America’s preemptive first strike against Iraq, director Bahman Ghobadi’s stark drama is less interested in international-skirmish specifics than in those caught in the crossfire. The film’s hero, a techno-whiz teen nicknamed ‘Satellite’ (Soran Ebrahim), keeps the town hooked up to CNN for word of the coming invasion and plays pied piper to the wounded kids from the local refugee camp. When an armless orphan with precognitive powers comes to town with his sister and the blind child they look after, Satellite feels the need to take them under his wing – particularly the attractive girl. Tragedy, however, is all the minefields and war zones of Iraq have to offer.“As in Ghobadi’s A Time For Drunken Horses, the mixture of magic realism and poetic ruralism lends the story a fablelike quality. The movie’s power, however, lies in its unsparingly grim visions of maimed children collecting mines for cash and turning bombed-out wastelands into playgrounds. While the film isn’t afraid to question whether the Western powers are aggressors or liberators (American military helicopters drop leaflets informing the villagers ‘Anyone who is not with us is our enemy! We are the best!’), Turtles Can Fly knows that regardless of who is in power, innocence always ends up a casualty of war.�– David Fear, Time Out New York