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This page is to obtain access to the Sands Films Cinema Club presentation ONLINE
To attend in person, please CLICK HERE
TURTLES CAN FLY
Bahman Ghobadi (2004)
Children in a time of war: Turtles Can Fly—Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand—. The film is by writer-director Bahman Ghobadi, an Iranian Kurd, who made A Time for Drunken Horses (Zamani barayé masti asbha, 2000) and Marooned in Iraq (Gomgashtei dar Aragh, 2002), the first film to be shown in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion, which I have described as “one of the most dazzlingly brilliant films I have seen about the impact of war on civilian populations,” “a comedy, robust, energetic and humane, in the great tradition of ‘road films,’ that veers seamlessly into a depiction of war’s horror and attendant grief.” Taking place both shortly before and following the U.S. invasion in search of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction,” Turtles Can Fly is the first film to be made in Iraq post-Saddam Hussein. While not as rich or wonderful as Marooned in Iraq, it has its poignant and powerful moments.
The film is set in the mountains in Kurdistan, Iraq, on the Turkish border. It portrays a makeshift camp of Kurdish children—orphans, refugees, children either entirely or largely on their own: a world within a world within a world, but a place unprotected from the chaos of war that the American invasion will inflict. Many of these children risk mutilation and death by hunting for unexploded devices in order to sell them to the resident U.N. representative. Some of them have already lost limbs in a terrain inundated with mines—a legacy of Saddam’s wars against Kurds and Turks, but mines, the film parenthetically notes, manufactured in the U.S. We watch one child—Hengov, who is known as The Boy with No Arms—defuse a mine by carefully pulling out the firing pin with his lips and teeth. The most suspenseful glimpse of child labor imaginable, this moment suggests the poise and effort required of all children there simply to survive.
Dennis Grunes.
Turtles Can Fly
Turtles can fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iran border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall.
- Year:
- 2004
- Runtime:
- 98 minutes
- Language:
- English, Kurdish, Arabic
- Director:
- Bahman Ghobadi
- Screenwriter:
- Bahman Ghobadi
- Producer:
- Bahman Ghobadi, Batin Ghobadi, Hamid Ghavami, Babak Amini
- Executive Producer:
- Abbas Ghazali
- Cast:
- Soran Ebrahim, Avaz Latif, Saddam Hossein Feysal
- Cinematographer:
- Shahriar Assadi
- Editor:
- Hayedeh Safiyari, Mostafa Kherghehpoosh
- Production Design:
- Bahman Ghobadi
- Composer:
- Hossein Alizadeh
This page is to obtain access to the Sands Films Cinema Club presentation ONLINE
To attend in person, please CLICK HERE
TURTLES CAN FLY
Bahman Ghobadi (2004)
Children in a time of war: Turtles Can Fly—Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand—. The film is by writer-director Bahman Ghobadi, an Iranian Kurd, who made A Time for Drunken Horses (Zamani barayé masti asbha, 2000) and Marooned in Iraq (Gomgashtei dar Aragh, 2002), the first film to be shown in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion, which I have described as “one of the most dazzlingly brilliant films I have seen about the impact of war on civilian populations,” “a comedy, robust, energetic and humane, in the great tradition of ‘road films,’ that veers seamlessly into a depiction of war’s horror and attendant grief.” Taking place both shortly before and following the U.S. invasion in search of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction,” Turtles Can Fly is the first film to be made in Iraq post-Saddam Hussein. While not as rich or wonderful as Marooned in Iraq, it has its poignant and powerful moments.
The film is set in the mountains in Kurdistan, Iraq, on the Turkish border. It portrays a makeshift camp of Kurdish children—orphans, refugees, children either entirely or largely on their own: a world within a world within a world, but a place unprotected from the chaos of war that the American invasion will inflict. Many of these children risk mutilation and death by hunting for unexploded devices in order to sell them to the resident U.N. representative. Some of them have already lost limbs in a terrain inundated with mines—a legacy of Saddam’s wars against Kurds and Turks, but mines, the film parenthetically notes, manufactured in the U.S. We watch one child—Hengov, who is known as The Boy with No Arms—defuse a mine by carefully pulling out the firing pin with his lips and teeth. The most suspenseful glimpse of child labor imaginable, this moment suggests the poise and effort required of all children there simply to survive.
Dennis Grunes.
Turtles Can Fly
Turtles can fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iran border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall.
- Year:
- 2004
- Runtime:
- 98 minutes
- Language:
- English, Kurdish, Arabic
- Director:
- Bahman Ghobadi
- Screenwriter:
- Bahman Ghobadi
- Producer:
- Bahman Ghobadi, Batin Ghobadi, Hamid Ghavami, Babak Amini
- Executive Producer:
- Abbas Ghazali
- Cast:
- Soran Ebrahim, Avaz Latif, Saddam Hossein Feysal
- Cinematographer:
- Shahriar Assadi
- Editor:
- Hayedeh Safiyari, Mostafa Kherghehpoosh
- Production Design:
- Bahman Ghobadi
- Composer:
- Hossein Alizadeh