turtles can fly (w&d bahman ghobadi)

A Kurdish refugee camp on the border of Iraq and Turkey. The refugee camp is littered with destroyed tanks and plagued by mines. The children in the camp earn their pennies by deactivating the mines and selling them on. In the arms bazaar in the local town they exchange mines for weapons. It is 2003, the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. The Kurds in the refugee camp have been brutally repressed by Saddam’s regime. They long for the war to start, even though there’s no security that this will make their conditions any better. However, it could hardly make them worse. The refugee camp is a sea of mud and chaos, with the ever-present risk of being killed or maimed by a stray mine, or being shot at by the Turkish border guard. This is the frontier between war zone and a gateway to Europe, or even the USA.

In this world, the bespectacled Satellite is prince. He buys the antenna that permits the elders to decode the news. He announces the arrival of rain and war. The kids follow him as though he’s a kind of pied piper. but he falls in love with Agrin, a young woman with a child, an armless brother and a death wish. We are a long way from Hollywood. The war will start, the Americans will come, Saddam will be deposed, but there can be no happy endings here.

Bahman Ghobadi’s film is achingly prescient, 20 years on. It’s a drama with the authenticity of the rawest of documentaries. Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurd whose sensibility to the issues of the Kurdish refugees is at times unbearably plausible. Cinema is a tool that allows us to walk through the mud with these characters, to feel as though we could reach out and touch them, even though we know we could never save them. It seems astonishing to me that Ghobadi is not better known. Perhaps his sensibility is considered too raw, too harrowing. But I don’t know of any work of art that has taken me closer to the realities of life in the shadow of 21st century geo-politics, and the way that the machinations of men and women in power impact on the lives of innocents. This is a masterpiece of filmmaking - an art which can make the intimacy of another’s life in a land we will probably never visit touch us in a way news reporting never can.