Blur a few of the details, and Turtles Can Fly might look like a Horatio Alger story. Set in a makeshift Kurdish community along the Iraq/Turkey border, the film stars Soran Ebrahim (like all of the cast, a non-professional actor) as an enterprising kid nicknamed Satellite. Ebrahim makes his living installing TV antennas, hooking up the occasional satellite connection, and hiring out a worshipful gang of boys to perform whatever odd jobs need doing in the tumultuous borderland they call home. Mostly—and this is where the Alger comparison falls apart—they spend their time removing land mines and by all accounts they do a good job of the dangerous work. True, some have suffered for it, but when a potential employer complains that half of them don't have hands any more, Ebrahim has the perfect response: "So what? They are not afraid of mines. They are our best."
Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi has already proven he knows about borders and the dangerous lives children lead there, with his 2000 debut A Time For Drunken Horses, a film set in a nameless mountain pass separating Iran and Iraq. Turtles Can Fly was made as a co-production between those two countries (previously an unthinkable prospect), and while avoiding any mention of politics might have been safest, Ghobadi goes a different route. Much of Turtles is set in the days leading up to the American invasion of Iraq, a prospect that fills its characters with dread. They don't hate America, and they certainly don't love Saddam Hussein, whose past attacks on the Kurds have made gas masks almost ubiquitous. But Ghobadi's characters recognize that no matter how the war comes out, it's bound to be another instance in which powers far removed from their daily lives determine their fates.
It's the children who suffer first, and suffer hardest. Ebrahim and his followers prove remarkably resilient. So does a prophetic armless boy who tends to his despondent teenage sister and the blind child that resulted from her rape at the hands of marauding solders. But the resilience only stretches so far, and as the film goes on, Ghobadi's ground-level approach captures just how physically and spiritually exhausting life is for the children of war. Death might come from the sky or from the ground, or it might not come at all, but the prospect of it always lingers. Turtles Can Fly creates a haunting reminder that collateral damage can't always be measured in casualty rates, and that it goes on long after the news cameras have left the scene.