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Right after I saw this movie I told someone I found it biblical, and she seemed a little taken aback. I suddenly realized how that might sound, especially to someone I barely know. It's a movie about the beginning of the U.S.-Iraq war in 2003, an event that's been interpreted in biblical terms far too often already. It might be more accurate to call the film Koranic, since it's an Iraqi-Iranian film about Kurds in northern Iraq, but I don't know enough about the Koran to say that. To me, knowing a bit about the Bible, it felt biblical. It's a movie about prophecies, messages from on high, and apocalypse, yet all in our own present-day world.
Filmed in Iraq after the fall of Saddam, Turtles Can Fly takes place in a village surrounded by minefields and ruined tanks. The children of the village, local residents and refugees alike, work as human minesweepers, and a lot of them are missing arms and legs. Everyone knows the war is about to start, but they need a satellite to pick up TV (namely US TV) to tell them when. The main character, a young adolescent called Satellite, has power and prestige (and hubris) because he knows how to get a dish and set it up. But someone else in town, called The Armless Boy, offers the villagers another kind of vision.
But though it has suspense and movement, what makes Turtles Can Fly so powerful is its vision of children growing up amid ongoing war. And these are real children, full of faults and immaturity and a sense of fun, not orphans staring dolefully into the eyes of relief workers. Writer-director Bahman Ghobadi doesn't use them as pawns in an anti-American or anti-Saddam diatribe but presents a nuanced picture. I believed this movie the way I believe any realistic story about boys meeting girls or kids bickering among themselves or watching out for younger kids. The fact that there are real children growing up in a world like that, even today, will probably never really sink in for me. Yet knowing how close this film was to the real action in a real war, along with powerful performances and stunningly beautiful shots in a stark mountain setting, made me feel the apocalyptic foreboding myself.