Kurdish Child

Using non-professional actors and an offbeat approach, Bahman Ghobadi is a master of the unconventional. Carol Murphy talks to the Kurdish filmmaker about his latest feature Turtles Can Fly, the first film to emerge from Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

In Turtles Can Fly [Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand], the first film to be made in and about Iraq since the downfall of Saddam Hussein, Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi is tenaciously driven to continue developing what he calls his language of 'magical realism'. Films such as Songs of My Motherland, A Time for Drunken Horses, and his backlog of shorts and documentaries have earned him pioneer status, and even the title 'the poet laureate of Kurdish Cinema'.

The visual beauty of Turtles Can Fly certainly justifies this accolade, however his process is dangerous and organic, not exclusive and rarefied. He is interested in reflecting reality, not in 'fantasizing reality' from a distance. Ghobadi's style does not endorse a documentary aesthetic, however much his difficult and tumultuous process is dictated by circumstances and the lives of those taking part both in front of and behind the camera – including Ghobadi himself. In one film a child will be an actor, in the next a runner; in the next a director of photography and in the next the writer or director. Ghobadi immerses himself in the lives of the non-actors taking part in the film. He becomes both a leader and a parent to the children involved, unable to sit still – not unlike the central character in Turtles Can Fly, the charismatic and relentlessly energetic Satellite. However, by the end of the film – when the Americans arrive – Satellite becomes just another crippled Kurdish child.

Turtles Can Fly is set in Iraqi Kurdistan, in a village and refugee camp on the border between Iran and Turkey. The villagers depend upon Satellite to barter and install satellite dishes so the locals can keep up to date on the impending attack of the Americans, even though they can't understand the language. Satellite is the engine of this film. He is a fearless leader, a ducker and diver and a father figure only a fraction older than the children in the village and camps who work for him clearing the mines in the adjacent countryside. The film begins with the energetic and spirited kafuffle surrounding the installation of one such satellite dish. On the same day a girl arrives with her blind child and mutilated brother. This trio causes divisions within the community of children, representing dark and foreboding harbingers. The detailed analysis of this childish community, and the supposed objectivity of the western news bulletins is dismantled by the netherworld of nihilistic mysticism embodied in the suicide attempts of the girl and the predictions of her psychic brother.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 102