Turtles can fly

Date: 24th October ’06

Turtles can fly

I did not know that turtles could fly. I never heard this before, but I knew that turtles can swim in the water. After all, I got confused when I heard the movie entitled Turtles Can Fly. The title made me curious to watch the movie. The next thing which created enthusiasm in me to watch this movie is because I have a friend from Kurdistan and the movie is about the story of refugee children living in the border of Iraqi Kurdistan. The movie is in Kurdish language. The subtitle in English made it easy to understand the story. Before watching this movie, I had little knowledge about Kurdistan, the Northern part of Iraq. I also heard that Kurds have no friends but mountains. Through Turtles Can Fly a real picture of the life of the refugee people in the border of Iraq is portrayed well. Children without hands, arms, or legs who are the victims of the horrible time in Kurdistan are shown strong in working hard and risking their lives for the sake of their survival. Though they look like turtles in physical appearances, these types of turtles are different in ideal because they are very powerful that they can fly.
I found this movie to be one of the best movies I have ever watched in my life. This is not like a movie for me; it’s a depiction of the real lives of many destitute children in Kurdistan, near the Iraq and Turkey border. The most important part of the movie is that there is nothing imaginary; every thing is about the real pathetic story of the children. I felt like I was present in some parts of Kurdistan and watching the kids with a gasp of desperation. I could envision their heart breaking and ruthless lives. The non professional characters in the movie seem to be playing their own role. The movie contains horror, humor, honor and compassion.
The movie starts with a suicide attempt by Agrin, a teenage girl, one of the main characters of the movie, whose parents were killed by the soldiers of Saddam Hussein during terrific chemical attack at Halabja, one of the towns in Kurdistan, in 1988. Agrin, who is merely a teenage girl, was raped by the soldiers. She came to another village with a three year old blind child and her armless brother who lost his both arms because of land mines that Saddam Hussein’s soldiers put in a very wide range of Kurdish lands. Traumatized and haunted by past memories, she repeatedly attempts suicide, sometime trying to jump from a high cliff and sometime jumping into a deep pond or pouring kerosene over herself. For her, the past is bitter, the present is bitter and even the future is bitter. The life is meaningless to her. What could be the most pathetic and atrocious life than this? Is not that a great catastrophe? How could she dare to live after all that heavy burden of devastation fell upon her? Is not that horrible?
The main part of the movie starts with the scene of many boys along with Soran, another main character of the movie, who is called Kak Satellite, trying to fix antennae on the hill side, just the day before U.S. led invasion of Iraq. This particular scene reveals people’s hunger for knowledge, their inventiveness in the face of horrible poverty. Esmael, an old man, carrying big antennae on his shoulder utters, “Look what Saddam has done to us! We have no water, no electricity and no school. They have deprived us from sky. They don’t even let our TVs work to see when the war will start.” Eventually, they managed to bring a satellite dish from a nearby town to quench the thirst of knowledge about the current news on ongoing situation of their country, after their futile try for local antennae went in vain. Soran is the sole person in the whole village who has knowledge about fixing satellite dish. He also becomes the source of news as he is the only one to translate English news into Kurdish language to the elders and the governor of the village. When he was asked with curiosity what the news is about on the TV, (and since he doesn’t have enough knowledge in translation), he says that it is going to rain the next day which portrays humor in the movie.
Soran seems to be a child of leadership among the children of refugee camps. The young teenage boy Soran works as a breadwinner for lots of children from those camps in the sense that he makes them to collect land mines, diffuses them carefully and trades with some local merchants. Every step of those children was the mark of danger. But still they defy the menace on their way and go for mines collection with no choice. For them it is better to be physically handicapped from the possible mine explosions than to die with hunger. Many of them are without arms and legs and still craving to go ahead in their lives, similar to the turtle with heavy burden of shell over it.
Bahman Ghobadi, an Irani born in Kurdistan, is the director, writer and producer of the movie. In one of the interviews with Bahman Ghobadi, he mentions that those mines made Kurdistan the hardest hit country and it will take long time to get rid of those mines. He also points out that the United States and some European nations sell them to dictators like Saddam Hussein. That is the reason each and every day children in those minefield areas get killed because of mine explosions.
He is the same director of the two famous Kurdish movies: A Time for Drunken Horses and Marooned in Iraq. He focuses the story on the pitiable condition of Agrin, her brother, and Riya, a three year old blind child (found somewhere). They have nobody to take care of them. Instead, they have to take care of Riya. They tie Riya with a rope before they sleep so that he won’t walk out when they are asleep. Agrin is already fed up with her own life and still she has to devote her time to Riya. She fails to commit suicide due to her internal love for Riya though she seems to hate him and sometimes calls him bastard. She wants to leave Riya and go far away with his brother. But her brother wants to take Riya with them. She knows that their lives would be worse if they have to live with Riya. In a Kurds’ culture, taking care of an abandoned child whose information about his or her family background is unknown is a matter of shame. Remembering this point, Agrin thinks about leaving Riya away from them. She more often fails in doing so. Once, after she left Riya near land mine field, Soran saves Riya’s life risking his life. Unfortunately, Soran gets injured with an explosion of mine. At the end of the story, Agrin wins her mission, losing her own life by jumping over the high cliff and taking Riya’s life throwing him into the pond. She does not want Riya to live in that heinous condition as she lived. She frees herself from this merciless world. The most pathetic scene of the movie is the last part after her suicide. Her brother runs in search of her and Riya. He came to know that Riya was drowned into the pond. With an ultimate sense of hope, he dives into the pond to know about Riya though he has no arms. This part shows the glimpse of the turtle swimming in the water. He found Riya inside the pond tied with rope along with heavy stone. After this overwhelming sight, he runs to find his sister and eventually, he found her pair of shoes left over on the cliff. He holds them on his mouth with his teeth. He loses his world without anything left. He cries bitterly, but nothing changed. Soran, too, becomes shocked and wails for painful separation from Agrin whom he cares about. The road where Soran is standing seems to be muddy. American troops step inside the village with tankers. They keep heading towards their village. In this way, the story ends with the entrance of American troops into their land.
Jurgen Fauth, in his review about the movie writes- “Ghobadi sprinkles some magic realism over the film, but the reality he is depicting is so bizarre that it barely registers as unlikely. If ours is a world where infants can toddle through minefields and red fish live at the bottom of sink holes near machine-gun infested borders, and children live in abandoned tanks and treat their toothaches with kerosene, then a mystical oracle is not such an unlikely thing. By showing image after startling image, Bahman Ghobadi makes us question every thing we think that we know” (2005). According to Rob Blackwelder, a movie reviewer, Turtles Can Fly is a tragic yet bittersweet, simple yet spellbinding slice of life's uncertainty (2005).
The movie is able to achieve success in what it wants to convey the viewers. It shows the real condition of refugee children living in one of the villages of Kurdistan. War is the major cause of all the catastrophes that befell in the village. Many innocent people became the victim of it. This is the literal message of the movie. This movie reminds me of those war hit victim children in our own villages.