iffr: turtles can fly
"Turtles Can Fly" is Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi's new film (after "A Time for Drunken Horses"), and the first film to be made in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Set in a refugee camp just before the war in Iraq, it portrays the grim daily life of a group of kids, many of them maimed, who, led by a boy called Satellite, gather mines to sell to the UN.
Newly arriving in the camp are a girl troubled by war traumas and her armless brother who can look into the future and foresees the coming of the war. Together they try to take care of a blind toddler.
Director Ghobadi explained in the Q&A after the screening how the image of these three children for him symbolized the different dimensions of time in the camp: the troubled past, the blind present and the prophetic future.
When asked how he managed to get such impressive acting from these children -- who are not actors but actual refugees in the camp -- he told us he tried to "keep the story as close as possible to their own personal experiences, so that they didn't have to act but could 'relive' the scenes..."