'Turtles Can Fly' has devastating power

"Turtles Can Fly" takes place at childhood's end. Bahman Ghobadi's relentless, bleakly funny, thoroughly remarkable drama is set in Iraq, near the Turkish border, in a Kurdish village that has been so swamped by a refugee camp. The air is crystalline, the surrounding mountains intensely beautiful, and the humans are small, pathetic figures in the landscape. What appear to be villagers tilling a field become, on closer inspection, children searching for land mines. They dig them up and sell them for food.

IFC Films 'Turtles Can Fly' 4 out of 5 stars Director: Bahman Ghobadi Starring: Soran Ebrahim, Avaz Latif, Hirsh Feyssal Release date: May 27, 2005 Rating: Not Rated. On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime [an error occurred while processing this directive]

The time is the eve of the U.S.-led invasion, and the few grown-ups we see are panicky. The village elders want CNN but can't get reception. Up steps Soran, aka "Satellite" (Soran Ebrahim), a lanky, bespectacled 13-year-old with the swaggering techno-savvy of a Kurdish Urkel. His parents are missing and never mentioned. Satellite has hooked up a number of villages with dish antennas, and he does the same for his latest hosts. The boy is asked to translate the newscasts for the elders. He's the only one not to look away in horror when channel-surfing past MTV.

Satellite is plugged in at all levels, assigning daily land-mine duty to the hordes of refugee children. He understands that knowledge is power and has created a support staff of "Little Rascal"-style toadies and assistants.

Ebrahim makes this smart, vengeful nerd a worrisome and charismatic figure, and for a while "Turtles Can Fly," an Iranian-Iraqi coproduction, looks as if it might as well be called ''The Education of a Strongman." But Ghobadi, who made the ragged but equally fine 2000 film "A Time for Drunken Horses," knows the world's cruelty surpasses even Satellite's ability to fix it, and he has a larger game in mind.

To that end, "Turtles" introduces Hangao (Hiresh Feysal Rahman) a young refugee who has lost his arms to a land mine but has somehow picked up the ability to predict future events. (This magical realism makes perfect sense in a world where one's fate is decided by governments thousands of miles away.) Satellite sees in Hengov first a rival and then a sort of palace seer to shore up his own power. Besides, he can't shake the image of Hengov's sister, Agrin (Avaz Latif).

Neither will you. Agrin haunts "Turtles Can Fly" with a natural beauty nullified of hope. She and Hengov care for a blind orphan toddler named Riga (Abdol Rahman Karim), and if the brother sees the child as a fresh shoot of life in a blasted world, to Agrin he's a daily reminder of pain.

Ghobadi gets full-on performances from his untrained cast. Capable, kind and serious, Rahman's Hangao becomes the heart of "Turtles Can Fly," pulling the comparatively shallow Satellite into his orbit until the latter actually performs acts that aren't in his immediate self-interest. This is not good for the boy's career as a future despot, but it does result in the most agonizing two minutes of suspense in recent films — the sort of genuine, human suspense that makes horror movies like "The Amityville Horror" look like a Muppet act.

Even in such moments, "Turtles" finds the dark humor of the lucky survivor. Ghobadi shows us a world where a village pond can hold both rare goldfish and unforgivable evil, and where every step is onto booby-trapped terrain. There can be no real power here, and Satellite, a survivor if ever there was one, learns it the hard way.