The character of Agrin, contemplating the abyss...We watch the young girl walk in bare feet to the razor blade edge of the cliff, and hope she does not fall. The wind moans in our ears, dusty pebbles shift under her apprehensive steps, and her dark eyes search the hollow space behind her. She returns her gaze to the desolate canyon before her, and draws her feet to the precipice sharpened with snow. And no, she does not fall into the careening abyss. She jumps.

From the opening scene, Bahman Ghobadi’s film, Turtles Can Fly, makes no presumptions at being uplifting. As the first feature film shot in Iraq since the American occupation began in 2003, the setting is tense and grim and the actors, mostly children, are both physically and emotionally mutilated. Set in a barren Kurdish refugee camp on the border of Iraq and Turkey, fenced in by barbed wire and military posts to one side, craggy mountains on the other, their world remains isolated from the rest of Iraq and the rest of the world. Those who can boast any knowledge of technology or the English language (or pretend to do so) are immediately elevated to the rank of soothsayer in the village, and those who attain such a status, through either wit or dumb luck, are loath to let it go.

Such is the case with Soran, called “Satellite,” whose identity and status in his community are rooted in his ability to install satellites in villages. Without this skill, as well as his claimed ability to speak and understand English (of which he can do neither, save for a few words), even his brazen personality would not be able to save him from the fate of silence and obscurity that faces every other orphan surrounding him. However, because of his authority in the village, he is respected by the elders who give him a place of his own to live and sleep, by the men in the markets with whom he trades mines and radios for satellites, and by the swarms of children that flock to him in reverence for work in the minefields. Once a beautiful girl, an armless boy, and a blind toddler arrive in the village, however, Satellite’s leadership role is challenged.

Agrin, a wraith of a girl who drifts with faint regard for anything or anyone, entrances Satellite with her beauty and nonchalance. Her older brother Hengov, a clairvoyant who shields his gift from prying eyes, presents an immediate challenge to Satellite when he informs the children that they will discover more mines in other fields than those Satellite has identified. The baby, Riga, whose connection to the pair remains in question, is bound to Agrin’s side with a thick piece of rope.

Turtles Can Fly: your purchase benefits LCC programmingThe children are tied to their circumstances with no escape route, no white flag. They collaborate together under the leadership of Satellite not for communal comfort or progress, but for personal survival. Agrin especially is bogged down in the obligations and fear that commit her presence to a place and people that she abhors. She continually asks Hergov when they may all leave the refugee camp, not because she anticipates arriving somewhere that is better than the place they left behind, but because the lack of mobility implies a degree of commitment and emotional investment in a world that she is not willing to accept. Riga, who is literally tied to Agrin while they sleep, is her largest attachment and most grievous burden. She continually tries to cleanse herself of his presence and weight through failed attempts at abandonment, in the hopes that the abandonment of the child will allow her to successfully abandon her history that follows her scent like a predator. For Agrin, dependency is a vice. Indifference is a virtue. To think or act otherwise is to open one’s wounds to the thrash and abuse of others’ presumptions and desires, and love is not an invincible coat of armor.

This film will not restore one’s faith in the individual human capacity to push past obstacles to success, nor will it strengthen our confidence in the supportive cradle of our local or global community. The only dreams the children obtain are finding enough mines to sell, to eat and shit and cry yet another day. They are not saved by wise and wizened elders; instead, the old and ignorant try to capitalize on Hengov’s clairvoyance and Satellite’s technological savvy. Nor will they be saved by the American troops that stomp through the streets in their professed mission to liberate these children from their lousy circumstances; the soldiers never pass a glance at a sobbing Hengov and a wasted Satellite standing on the fringe of the road. The children must therefore learn to save themselves in whatever way they can, and their solutions are not as kosher as what a politically correct and censored crowd that donates to UNICEF might like to see. However, what Turtles evades in sugar-laced child success stories, it restores in a biting, cleansing challenge to our expected roles and aspirations for all children in all times and all places.

Bahman GhobadiBahman Ghobadi, a Turkish-Iranian filmmaker who earned accolades in 2000 with A Time for Drunken Horses, the first Kurdish film produced in Iran, was in an ideal position to present the story of Kurdish children in Iraq from an intimate perspective. Ghobadi does not present the story as a beautifully tragic symphony of photos on page six of the New York Times that we ponder for 17 seconds while we enjoy our morning cup of coffee, nor does he plaster the film with faces of sad children with hungry eyes that implore benefactors to give, give, give. Instead, Turtles Can Fly draws its audience into the gritty struggles of its characters through the direct vantage point of the children; we see their world from their stunted height, and we hear their world through the filters created by a child’s fresh attention to strangeness and the echoes of post-traumatic stress disorder.

When the children are collecting bombs that haven’t exploded, Riga walks amid piles of hollow artillery shells, curiously looking inside them in the way that other children explore empty cardboard boxes. He coos into them, entranced by their metal reverberating chimes. Agrin is in a separate world, haunted, not entranced, by the clang of shells and bombs as they hammer against one another; all other sounds disappear, and this harsh slicing of sound draws her back into memories that she cannot dismiss. Hengov also interprets the moment completely differently from the other two, seeing not what is occurring in the present or what occurred in the past, but descending into a trance state in which he foresees the explosion of the bombs the children are loading into trucks.

Ghobadi’s keen sense of sound editing and handling of the camera at a low height, handheld when exploring the children’s territory, makes the film a risky endeavor, because it evades immediate connection with the affluent, globally-aware adult crowd that will inevitably be drawn to Turtles’ synopsis. Fortunately for us, and perhaps not so fortunate for the children, however, their emotions and experiences are immediately accessible because they are not the concerns we typically associate with childhood.

The children of Turtles are neither children nor adults in the traditional definition of the term. Like turtles, they live in two worlds simultaneously, on land and in water, inhabiting a gray area in which they experience life through the raw and playful eyes of children but are laden with the choices and conflicts of adulthood, thrust upon them by the urgency of war. Satellite’s friend, a cripple, hoists his deformed leg into the crutch of his arm like an AK-47, laughing as he pretends to shoot at the watchtower off in the distance. Satellite pursues Agrin with a conviction unusual for his age, telling her that he has been looking for a girl like her his entire life, his entire thirteen years of existence. As a sign of his affection, he buys her a necklace at the market while he is purchasing rifles, an exquisite piece adorned with bullet casings. Satellite and his friend, like the children around them, are all navigating fragile territory, trying to protect themselves from the mines burrowed in the earth under their feet, presented with few other choices than to keep walking and digging up those things that would threaten to mutilate their body and spirit.

Another choice is always available, however. Endowed with the scars of adulthood, these children are also endowed with the choices that only those indoctrinated into such adverse pain may claim. It is the choice to not remain constrained by the boundaries erected by one’s life and to continue sinking into inescapable misery without hope for release. It is the choice to empower oneself with the agency to choose one’s own liberation instead of having it determined by an outside force. Agrin makes this choice, a choice of which we are presented at the beginning of the film, of which we are reminded in the middle, and which meets us again at the end when she jumps off the cliff, flying away from her pain as she falls to her death. The film is not pretty. It is not easy. And thankfully so. Ghobadi has gifted us with a gem of a story, one that prods our conception of occupation and liberation with subtle, sensitive touches.

—Jessica Schreibstein