Turtles Can Fly

Bahman Ghobadi's film is set in the spring of 2003, in a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan on the border with Iran and Turkey. While the American invasion is awaited, the children survive by collecting mines: they lift unexploded ordnance out of the fields and sell it, and children who have lost arms and legs are an ordinary sight in the camp. The boy nicknamed Satellite is the most capable there; he knows how to rig an aerial, find a news channel and hand out work. Then a boy with no arms arrives with his sister and a small child, and the film's real subject emerges from that. Its strength is showing the children as at once extremely competent and entirely unprotected. Ghobadi worked with non-professionals, and some of the children in the cast had genuinely lost limbs to mines. It was the first film made in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and won the Golden Shell at San Sebastián in 2004. Who it is for: viewers interested in films about what war does to children and in Kurdish cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a hopeful ending, which the film nowhere supplies.