When the credits rolled following Lukas Moodysson’s brilliant and brutal Lilya 4-ever, I was certain I would never again encounter such a raw and powerful display of utter despair. It is a work of near perfection, and yet it fits into the category of films that I don’t foresee ever watching again.
Evocative of Lilya because it is just as brutal and is presented without the taint of dramatization, Turtles Can Fly is also a heartbreaking film. Yet I want to return to the film already. Not to the film, but to writer/director Bahman Ghobadi’s characters, who are so magnetic, so beautifully unadorned, and provide a redemptive quality not found in Moodysson’s film.
Turtles immediately immerses the viewer into a strange and seemingly improbable world populated by displaced children near the Iraq-Turkey border just before the US invasion of Iraq. Led by a clever dynamo — a boy of maybe 14 years nicknamed Satellite — the scores of children make money clearing mines and doing other dangerous labor. The adults we occasionally see are mostly inept, sometimes malicious, and presumably too preoccupied by survival to spend much time with these children.
Like many films featuring amateur children (City of God, George Washington, Raising Victor Vargas), some of these little actors are better than others. As an ensemble, though, they are tremendous. The editing style is reminiscent of a Dardenne brothers’ film (The Son), in which cuts often propel the action forward unexpectedly, keeping the audience off balance. Much of the context and backstory for the characters is merely implied or left unexplained, which is effective in surreptitiously investing you in each character’s journey. The film is structured through two main points of view: the first is through the opportunistic yet paternal Satellite, and the second is through orphaned siblings who have recently joined the camp: an ostensibly armless boy with an apparent gift for prophecy — a potential rival to Satellite; the boy’s sister, who captures Satellite’s fancy; and an absolutely adorable little boy, probably 2 years old, whose identity propels much of the movie’s narrative.
The film isn’t really so much about war, but instead the lives of those on the periphery of war, political unrest, and poverty. I was unsure at first whether the film would resonate. By the end, as the robotic US troops march by the children with apparent indifference, I was completely powerless, wanting to rescue each and every one of them.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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