I watched Turtles Can Fly at university in 2018. It was the first film to come out of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. More importantly: I wrote a paper about it for a film analysis class that I was disappointed to reread. There are of course ways academia can encourage intellectual nonsense, but this is enabled and fuelled by a distance which today feels extremely violent to me. I was above all disappointed because this distance didn’t allow me to recognise why I had even liked the film, why it had touched me so deeply.
If you had asked me about the film in 2018, I would have praised “its use of long takes and slow rhythm in constructing a powerful and rigorously emotional texture of the Kurdish people”. What? To Rawy Films, to whom I mentioned this paper, here it is revisited, completely rewritten.
Turtles Can Fly is a film directed by Bahman Ghobadi in 2004. The story is about a Kurdish refugee camp in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq by US forces in 2003. The actors were played by Kurdish adolescents who lived in refugee camps in northeast Iraq. According to this article (https://onartandaesthetics.com/2016/04/15/turtles-can-fly/), “Ghobadi was prompted to make a movie with real people as ‘’superstars” and with Bush and Saddam as “extras” in the background when he visited Baghdad from Tehran in the spring of 2003 (two weeks after Saddam’s fall) with a small video camera.”
He says:
“I didn’t have a script. I had only written about 20% of it. I went there knowing that I had to quickly make a film in the situation that existed in Iraq at the time. In two, two and a half months, with five cars and five people including myself, each of us had a small video camera, we searched all the northeastern area of Iraq. Several towns and villages, and the roads, both to find actors and locations and to complete the script…Along the way I saw thousands of children and each was better than the other. I had so many choices. I just picked these ones. They were all talented. They were all amazing. If I wanted a child with no hands, in that border region I could find a thousand children who had lost their hands and feet walking on the mines… It was both easy and hard, but in the end, what I want to tell you is that I enjoyed very much the whole process of making this film, especially finding the actors.”
Home to a significant Kurdish population is a landlocked space defined by everything it is not. Global population figures estimate between 30 and 45 million Kurdish people, with the majority dispersed in regions spanning Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The borders surrounding the region are natural — mountains, rivers — and artificial, politically charged. None of these borders exist in any sense if not through the violent and abstract modes of reproduction and affirmation.
Ghobadi tells the story of a people isolated in the mountains, absent from the media. A kid nicknamed Satellite, for his skills in installing satellite dishes for villages, tries to translate CNN images of George W. Bush he doesn’t understand.
“What is he saying?”
“It’s going to rain tomorrow.”
It doesn‘t matter what the TV says, the film tells us again and again. The words coming from the TV make no sense – not only literally, because they are not understood, but because they have no meaning in their lives, create no difference.
In Turtles Can Fly, we see many degrees in which borders happen. This particular refugee camp is split between Turkey and Iraq, separating homes and families, and surrounding the region with landmines that the children — led by Satellite — sell for metal. As Ghobadi says, he could find a thousand children who had lost their limbs walking on them. With its boundaries, the body is supposed to be our primary habitat. These children are prevented from having a space even in their most intimate and primary home, consequently having no way of establishing an identity. The notion of identity runs parallel with that of borders, for how else do we know what we are from what we are not? Physical confinement means further psychological isolation.
The installation of satellite dishes across the village both transcends geographical borders and creates others; linguistic barriers of US-American news, cultural and ethno-social barriers of “haram, sexy” music videos from the West. Monopolisation of this occidental market is the foundation of globalisation, which constantly removes and creates borders. The generational gap between the village’s inhabitants is a frontier constantly crossed by the reversal of children‘s and adult roles. The elders need to be taken care of, the children provide. But even through the metaphorisation of borders, the film doesn’t ignore the physical ones, very real and connoting immense risk. On the contrary, it’s on all these layers that the borders, and the wounds they inflict, are felt.
Turtles Can Fly is by no means a happy film, but it’s also not defeatist, as you can maybe tell from the title. If you like Italian neorealism, Vittorio de Sica, films created in immediate response to the post-war period, Turtles Can Fly has this quality of timelessness and resonance. It’s a film to watch in urgent times when a gap must be filled. It shows us the impact of war, displacement and trauma on real lives. “The stories it sets out to tell one never gets to hear on television news channels or newspapers. There, war is represented in an incomplete and reduced form – as statistics of the dead or abstract ideological debates.”
