Turtles Can Fly
After Suddam Hussein attacked his own Kurdish citizens and just before the Americans invaded Iraq, a group of refugee kids on the Turkey-Iraq border scrambles to survive. In Turtles Can Fly (Iran; 2005), a bright, young wheeler-dealer called Satellite organizes work groups of kids to comb the hillsides and dismantle and sell land mines. The Boy with No Arms, his pretty sister, and their little brother wander into camp. The Boy with No Arms can predict the future, reluctantly but quite well. Satellite, however, is mainly interested in the sister, who sullenly rejects his boisterous overtures. While Satellite dashes around erecting the first satellite dish for the camp so they can get news of impending war, while he ventures off to a market to rent two big automatic weapons, and while he plays the big man around town on his fancy bicycle, we get a glimpse through a flashback and a comment that the teenaged girl was raped by Iraqi soldiers,the little boy is her baby, and she hates him and her life. She ties the little guy to a tree and leaves him on the mountain side, but he gets free and wanders back through a mine field. Satellite tries to rescue him. Warning: If you do not want to know the end of the movie, read no further. A mine mangles Satellite’s foot. The girl finally finds a way to get rid of her baby and herself. At the end of Bahman Ghobadi’s documentary-looking movie, the American armoured cars and soldiers run down the road, and some of the kids are excited by the new possibilities for adventure, money, and forbidden television channels. But Satellite turns his back on the traffic. He has had enough.
Jim Bell