Producers: Bahman Ghobadi, Abbas Ghazali
Director: Bahman Ghobadi
Story: Bahman Ghobadi
Stars: Soran Ebrahim, Avaz Latif, Hirsh Feyssal, SaddamHossein Feysal, HireshFeysal Rahman, Abdol Rahman Karim, Ajil Zibari

Creative Quotient:
This film has won its laurels at festivals for some years now. It’s one of the best specimens of cinema starring young children in stellar roles. It is also a harsh look at the reality of war in childhood.

Set in a Kurdish refugee camp the dramatis personae are children and teenagers, all of them orphans; there are adults in the camp, but the kids run their own lives — especially a bright wheeler-dealer named Satellite, who organises work gangs of other children to disarm land mines, so they can be re-sold to arms dealers in the nearby town. Early in the film, we see a character named Hyenkov , known to everyone as The Boy With No Arms, who gently disarms a mine by removing the firing pin with his lips!

Satellite pays special attention to a girl named Agrin, who is Hyenkov’s sister. They have a little brother named Risa, who is carried about with his arms wrapped around the neck of his armless brother. We ‘think’ he is their brother, that is, until we discover he is Agrin’s child, born after she was raped by Iraqi soldiers while still almost a child. The armless boy loves Risa; his sister hates him, because of her memories.

The refugees live in tents and huts. They raise money by scavenging. Satellite is the most resourceful person in the camp, making announcements, calling meetings, assigning work and travelling ceremonially on a bicycle festooned with ribbons and glittering medallions. He is always talking, shouting and hectoring at the top of his voice: He is too busy to reflect on the misery of his life.

The village is desperate for information about the coming American invasion. There is a scene of human comedy in which every household has a member up on a hill with a makeshift TV antenna; those below shout instructions: “To the left! A little to the right!” But no signal is received. Satellite announces that he will go to town and barter for a satellite dish. There is a sensation when he returns with one. The elders gather as he tries to bring in a signal. The sexy music video channels are prohibited, but the elders wait patiently as Satellite cycles through the sin until he finds CNN and they can listen for English words they understand. They hate Saddam and eagerly await the Americans.

Even as the tragic story develops, the film retains an astonishingly light-hearted spirit as Ghobadi follows Satellite, his go-getter. The two starkly-different tones finally meld into one in a phenomenal scene set just after the U.S. invasion (actual Yank soldiers and tanks appear on screen), when a hurt Satellite is offered an armbroken off from a Saddam statue.

Technical Expertise:
Bahman Ghobadi delivers a complicated view of the war. The characters shrug off the actual invasion in the face of Agrin’s horrific plight. Though the people in Turtles Can Fly are stuck in one place, the film’s action holds. As he has shown in Drunken Horses, Ghobadi once again pulls amazingly rich performances out of real non-professional child actors, all of them enhanced by his terrific sense of humour. Soran Ebrahim as Satellite is astounding, Avaz Latif as Agrin is another discovery. On the whole Turtles Can Fly is a heart-rending story about children who are inflicted with the vagaries of war.