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THE people gathered to see a much-appreciated film on the last day of the Osian Festival. It has a curious title: Turtles Can Fly.The flash of an image on the screen suddenly interrupts the thoughts. A pretty little girl with a face eloquent in its sadness is taking deliberate small steps and in a few seconds she is at the edge of a steep cliff and then she jumps down. The audience gasps and now they are seeing the credit titles. Then the film opens onto a stark rural landscape in an Iraq village where lads are fixing antennas because the elders want to see the forbidden television to find out if America is going to attack Iraq. The film is set in a village of Iraqi Kurdistan, on the border between Iran and Turkey, where orphaned refugee children dismantle mines and sell them for a few dinars. In the 97 minutes of the films with many humorous situations a whole lot of fun for children will be children, but for the sad-faced child woman who moves about with a bonnie blind baby on her back, the story unfolds. Satellite (Soran Ebrahim), much in demand for he knows how to fix antennas and dish as well as can speak a few words of English, loses his heart to the sad Agrin (Avaz Latif). Her brother Henkov (Hirsh Feyssal) has lost both his arms in a mine explosion and now dismantles mines with his mouth.Agrin keeps rehearsing her own suicide and the death for her baby through the film. American helicopters throw pamphlets promising paradise to the villagers and as Saddam Hussein falls, Agrin tormented by what her young years have seen drowns the child and then jumps off the cliff. The American soldiers march in and Satellite turns the other way for he has seen what paradise war brings with his own foot blown off trying to save the child earlier. The cast of the children who are the protagonists of this film is all under 14 and many of them actually victims of the war. They have acted superbly in this third film by Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi that won the Berlin Festival Prize for the Best Peace Film of 2005. In the spring of 2005 he slipped across the border to screen his second film Marooned in Iran at Baghdad for it could not have been screened in the Saddam regime. He also had a small video camera that moved with him. Seeing the footage proved to be the beginning of a new film. As Ghobadi puts it, "What I saw was startling: a land full of mines and refugee tents and disabled children ... arms sellers, abandoned tanks, mortars. I could not sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I was haunted by those images. I led myself back over the border and started work." The result of the work was one of the finest films on the havoc that war plays with little lives. Henkov has a nightmare telling him of things to come, Satellite sees the baby he had saved, at the cost of his own leg, drowned and Agrin moves ever so slowly towards the cliff. And then comes the suicidal leap. Yes, turtles can certainly fly. |
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