Movie Reviews for Turtles Can Fly

Turtles Can Fly

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Movie Reviews of Turtles Can Fly

Movie Review: Humanity Without boundaries
Summary: 5 Stars

Awesome movie. Incredible 'humaness' in the face of menacing forces. Human forces nurtured from kids to adulthood. I recommend this movie and aAli Soua about street kids in Moroccco. My 8 year also enjoyed this movie immesenly, few months after viewing it she stills once in awhile talks about it... particularly about the little girl... Powerful

Movie Review: Yes, even Turtles Can Fly
Summary: 5 Stars

The title TURTLES CAN FLY is actually a metaphor for the film. They, the children (and presumably the Kurdish people), are like the turtle, struggling to navigate and rise above a sea of adversities, namely their surroundings and circumstances. In this case, they are refugees on the Turkish-Iraqi border eking out a living to gather and sell scrap military equipment, namely landmines.

While watching Bahman Ghobad's film TURTLES CAN FLY I kept thinking how gutsy and enterprising the children were amidst their desperate condition. Their light humour and camaraderie gave me the impression they would prevail amidst their trials and tribulations, although it would not be an easy task.

Throughout the film you feel the Kurdish people's nomadic existence. In particular, you feel Agrin's (Avaz Latif) lost innocence from a gang rape by Iraqi soldiers in Halabche, her antipathy for the child born of this crime and her futility to care for her blind child in a culture that has perhaps cast her out. You feel Henkov's (Hiresh Feysal Rahman) nobility to hold the family together, to protect his sister's honour and the life of the child, even though he is physically handicapped. You feel Satellite's (Soran Ebrahim) love for and loss of Agrin and the child, as well as his own uncertainty of the future at the end of the film.

Surprising, there are no heroes in this film: not the children, not the village elders, not the black-marketers, not the American army. The story unfolds as a documentary, revealing events as they more or less happen, while weaving a subtle moral tale within it.

Like the neorealist director Roberto Rossellini's post-WWII film Germany Year Zero (1947), TURTLES CAN FLY explores how warmongers destroy and corrupt lives; how humanity struggles in the aftermath of war and displacement; and how some die as a result, yet how humanity as a whole rises to the challenge though it is immensely difficult.

Movie Review: Extremely powerful film
Summary: 5 Stars

"I didn't watch this because it won all those awards. I watched it because Michael LaRocca recommended it."

These are words you'll never hear. And yet, I do have to throw my voice into this chorus and say it's humorous and tragic, for a powerfully moving film that you won't forget. I'm putting it over there on that little shelf of DVDs that I call "keepers."

Movie Review: So. . .shame on me
Summary: 5 Stars

So here is this movie, set in Iraq shortly before the arrival of American troops. . .And there was misery in the country.
Leaflets drop from the helicopters of the liberating U.S Army. "We are here to take away your sorrows," the leaflets proclaim. "We are the best in the world." And. . .there still is misery in the country.
So allow me, a presently unproud American who has served his country, to question why "we are the best in the world"? Does our might make us so, our arrogance, our ignorance, our excess, our vanity? What god-awful temerity allows us to make this God-like claim to vanquish sorrow?
So allow me, also, this introspection: I haven't the dedication, the loyalty, the love, the compassion of any one of the orphaned Iraqi children pictured in this movie. Shame on me. May the spirit of the doomed children in this movie invade me. Let them liberate me!
This is not a political film; it is humanitarian act from the Iranian and Iraqi filmmakers to us. They are kin to Langston Hughes, the American poet who wished and wrote: "Let America be America again."