Film Review Turtles Can Fly

Contributed by Brad Lacey
10 Nov 05

The best thing about the Melbourne International Film Festival is that you get to see brilliance from all kinds of places that you might otherwise never have looked. Turtles Can Fly, Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s third feature, is one such example.

Set in Iraq at the beginning of the US-led invasion, the film follows the progress of the war through the eyes of Kak Satellite, a boy who makes do by organising the masses of children – orphaned, homeless, or just aimless – into mine-collecting cooperatives. Yes, this is a foreign world to us, but Ghobadi, aside from a few heavy excursions into the trite rising strings of those special moments, never trivialises it.

Instead, the film’s cinematographic compositions and soundscapes serve only to validate the awkward position between hope and hopelessness.

There are tragedies here but it is the nature of war, and Ghobadi does not shirk the harrowing responsibilities. What’s best though is to finally see a film made from the inside; well-meaning US war critics can make good films too, and have, but none can be as important as a film like this.

Ghobadi’s perspective as a Kurdish intellectual is surely different from the ‘common Iraqi,’ yet one never feels as if the film is preaching. The use of Kak as a device through which to ground the story is both purposefully transparent, and touchingly poignant. These kids, perhaps due to their real-life ethnicities and circumstances, seem in touch with something that is sorely lacking in most Western films. It is a shame that it takes a war to find this poignancy, whatever it is, but it is a credit to Ghobadi for knowing exactly where to point his camera and picking it up every time.

8/10


Brad Lacey is Editor of Rabelais (La Trobe University’s magazine), and is studying for his Master of Arts in Writing and Literature. In his spare time he wishes that he could dance like Fred Astaire.