General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Turtles Can Fly

Turtles Can Fly (Kurdish: Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand, لاک پشت ها هم پرواز میکنند) is a 2004 war drama directed and written by the Iranian Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, set in a Kurdish refugee camp on the Iraq–Turkey border in the days before the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. It was the first feature film made in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and it won the Golden Shell, the top prize at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, before serving as Iran's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Bahman Ghobadi, an Iranian Kurd born in 1968 in Baneh and the first Kurdish director in the history of Iranian cinematography⁴
Setting	A Kurdish refugee camp on the Iraqi–Turkish border on the eve of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq³
Principal cast	Non-professional actors Soran Ebrahim (Satellite), Avaz Latif (Agrin), Hiresh Feysal Rahman (Hengov), and Abdol Rahman Karim (Riga)⁵^•⁶
Language and format	Kurdish dialogue, shot on 35 mm color; listed runtimes vary between 95 and 98 minutes⁴^•⁷
Major awards	Golden Shell at San Sebastián 2004; Silver Hugo at Chicago 2004; Peace Film Award and Crystal Bear Special Mention at Berlin 2005; 24 wins and 8 nominations overall²^•⁸
Reception	Metascore 85 (universal acclaim, 31 reviews); 87% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 71 reviews⁹^•⁶
US release	Rights acquired by IFC Films in November 2004; theatrical release February 18, 2005; US gross $256,800³^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The film follows the children of a Kurdish village and refugee camp near the borders of Turkey and Iran as rumors of the American attack spread. The villagers desperately seek a satellite dish so they can follow news of the coming war, and a resourceful 13-year-old nicknamed Satellite (Soran Ebrahim) earns his place as the de facto leader of the local children by installing dishes and translating the broadcasts. He organizes the orphans into teams that clear and collect the landmines littering the countryside, which they sell or trade to survive.⁷^•⁶

The balance of the story shifts with the arrival of three newcomers: Agrin (Avaz Latif), a young orphan girl; her armless brother Hengov (Hiresh Feysal Rahman), who disarms undetonated mines with his teeth and suffers uncannily accurate predictive dreams; and a blind toddler, Riga (Abdol Rahman Karim), whom the siblings keep on a leash so he does not wander into a minefield. Satellite falls for Agrin, but she is haunted by the film's central trauma: in the backdrop of the Iraqi assault on Halabja, soldiers killed her parents and raped her, and the child she cares for is a constant reminder of that violence.¹⁰^•¹¹ The film's thematic focus is the psychological aftermath of these events, and the truth about Agrin and the toddler is withheld until the ending.¹⁰^•¹¹

Roger Ebert, reviewing the film in April 2005, noted that the characters look forward to the invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein, and that the movie takes no position on the war itself: it is about refugees preoccupied with staying alive in a world that has no place for them.¹²

Production

Ghobadi did not set out to make the film. He was shooting an urban project in Tehran when, shortly after Hussein's fall, he traveled to Iraq to screen his second feature, Marooned in Iraq, and was struck by the young Kurds he met there, many maimed by landmines or scarred by the brutality of the regime. He abandoned the Tehran project and moved to Iraq to make this one instead.⁵

Non-professional casting. Ghobadi spent months combing northern Iraq for children to play the leads, and he filmed on location in Iraqi Kurdistan under the protection of 30 bodyguards. He explained his method directly: amateur actors perform well because the story is their own and they have lived it, so real locations and real stories are what make the audience believe the film.⁵ The production companies were Mij Film Co. and BAC Films, with Hossein Alizadeh composing the music and Shahriar Asadi as cinematographer.⁴^•¹⁰

Ghobadi dedicated the film "to all the innocent children in the world who are the victims of the dictators and fascists' policy," and described it as an antiwar film and his personal view of the US war in Iraq. He deliberately reversed the television imagery of the period: Bush and Saddam had become the superstars of the satellite channels, so he pushed them into the background and made people and children the superstars of his film.⁷^•⁵

Release and awards

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2004, and screened at Pusan (Busan) that year and Rotterdam in 2005.¹⁰^•¹³ At San Sebastián in September 2004 it won the Golden Shell for best film; jury president Mario Vargas Llosa said the film, shot in Iraq, had moved all the judges with the terrible conditions of its filming and its humanity, poetry, and even humor. The Guardian reported that the film had previously been rejected by the Venice Film Festival.²

Further honors followed: the Silver Hugo (Jury Special Prize) at Chicago in 2004, the Peace Film Award and a Crystal Bear Special Mention at Berlin in 2005, audience awards at Rotterdam, Melbourne, Fribourg, and São Paulo, and the Golden Butterfly at Isfahan. IMDb counts 24 wins and 8 nominations in total.⁸ In November 2004, IFC Films acquired US rights in all media; its president Jonathan Sehring called the film a masterpiece and predicted it would be recognized as one of the greatest antiwar films ever made.³ The film opened in the UK on January 7, 2005, in the United States on February 18, 2005, and in France on February 23, 2005, and earned $256,800 at the US box office.¹⁰^•⁶

Critical reception

The film's Metascore of 85 from 31 critics falls in the "universal acclaim" band, with 30 positive reviews, one mixed, and none negative; the Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus hails it as extraordinary, moving, and lyrical.⁹^•⁶ Reviewers singled out the blend of tragedy and comedy. Robert Koehler in Variety wrote that Ghobadi displays complete command of his art as he shifts between, and even blends, wrenching tragedy and amusing comedy; Anthony Lane in The New Yorker wrote that the film has little space for mawkishness and seems to bleed straight out of the headlines.⁹ The Washington Post's review praised Ghobadi's gift for working with child actors, especially disabled ones, without exploiting their infirmities or youth for sympathy.¹¹

Place in Ghobadi's work and Kurdish cinema

Turtles Can Fly was Ghobadi's third feature, following A Time for Drunken Horses (1999) and Marooned in Iraq (2002), with Tambourine (2003) and The War Is Over (2004) between them. It is the only one of his films set exclusively in one country, Iraq.⁴^•¹⁴ Scholars of his cinema note recurring elements across his films: real locations, non-actors, improvisation, a fine line between the documentary and the fictional, and the recurrent use of children.¹⁵ The film has also been read alongside neorealist works such as Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1947) and Ziad Doueiri's West Beirut (1998), which likewise place children at the center of war-torn settings.¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released since 2000 › Released 2000 to 2016

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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