Award Winning Iranian Film Features Children Disabled by War
By Barbara Duncan (barbaraduncan@gmail.com)
Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi is already well known for his visually arresting and complex films, such as "Marooned in Iraq" and "A Time for Drunken Horses," using non-professional actors to capture the lives of people who must use desperate measures to survive poverty. According to the judges and reviewers from the San Sebastian and Toronto Film Festivals, "Turtles Can Fly" is another impressive accomplishment in this vein, earning top prizes from both.
This film chronicles life in a remote Kurdish village on the Turkish-Iraqi border, immediately before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, through the eyes of a small band of orphaned children, mostly disabled by landmines and neglect. The leader of the group, a 13 year old nicknamed Satellite, organizes the children to clear ordnance from local fields to earn enough money to feed the refugee population.
According to Noah Cowan, a Canadian reviewer, "Turtles Can Fly is told in Ghobadi's characteristically luminous yet restrained tones, shuttling between epic sweeps of this extraordinarily beautiful area and the intimate realities of their day to day lives...This may be Ghobadi's best effort yet to support his resolute belief that every life counts."
Another reviewer, J. Robert Parks, said, "While Ghobadi's tale is a sad one, he leavens it with humor and spot-on observations of how children interact. The non-professional cast, another hallmark of Iranian cinema, is strong, even in the final act when events grow more intense."
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