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Turtles Can Fly Director: Bahman Ghobadi Rated M Palace Nova It's ironic that Donald Rumsfeld should arrive in Adelaide on the same day that 'Turtles Can Fly' opens at the Palace as the film encapsulates the reality of the Iraqi experience more honestly and succinctly than a thousand Fox News bulletins or Rumsfeld speeches. The film is set in a small village/refugee camp near the Turkey/Iraq/Kurdistan border at the beginning of the second Gulf War. Satellite (Soran Ebrahim)- named for his technological wizardry, is the village's teenage capitalist entrepreneur. He is determined to procure a satellite dish for the village so that everyone can watch the American invasion as it unfolds. Satellite makes his living by contracting out village children to clear US Army mines from the properties of local landowners. However, Satellite's focus is disrupted by the arrival of the traumatized Agrin (Avaz Latif), her brother Henkov (Hirsh Feyssal) - who has lost both of his arms to mines, but who still clears them for a living, and a little blind toddler whom the orphaned Agrin and Henkov have taken into their care. Satellite tries to befriend Agrin, but Agrin's psychological scars have brought her to the brink of suicide. Henkov has the power of second sight, but is cursed by the perpetual nightmares that it brings. Producer/writer/director Bahman Ghobadi bravely wears his pacifism on his sleeve and 'Turtles Can Fly' is the most legitimate addition to the anti-war film canon since Mike Nichols' 'Catch 22' - and that includes the Vietnam War blockbusters that Hollywood released in the 'eighties. Indeed, the film is an Iraqi 'Catch 22' as absurdity abounds. Satellite finds a dish and installs a television for the village elders to watch the war. However, all that they are able to view is the English languaged and thus indecipherable Fox News. The US mines the children clear are exchanged at a local arms market for rifles. The film's title itself is absurd, as the children are like the little boy's turtles, wingless and forced to swim and meander through the morass that surrounds them. Ghobadi also layers his screenplay with Biblical symbolism, but as an attack on Christianity's links with imperialism. Henkov, Agrin and the child are a Holy Family destroyed not saved. The child himself has an unworldly aura, appears to Agrin in a dream and miraculously survives a number of close calls. However, in the end, the child proves impotent against the depth of Agrin's melancholia. The ponds and pools in the village are polluted and threatening- hardly baptismal. The village is surrounded with barbed wire fences and cliffs. Existence is entirely precarious. The message is amplified by the naturalism of the performances and the fact that many of the participants are real maimed victims. Despite the film's budgetary limitations, the invasion scenes and flashbacks are authentic and haunting; the multitalented Ghobadi himself did the production design. The film's climax is disturbing and the optimistic Satellite learns a cruel lesson when he finds that the faith he placed in the United States was misplaced. It would seem that people are forcibly displaced whenever the Americans visit, whether they are paid up members of expensive Adelaide gyms or innocent children in makeshift refugee camps...  |
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