Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Excellent but underrated film

Best movie ever!

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

I never seen any Kurdish movie better than this but a bit difficult understanding

The energetic film, with a dark sense of humor, charges into one impending critical situation after another and never pauses to look back to evaluate what took place. Many possible subplots are brought up and just as quickly are forgotten (such as, an Iranian doctor in Iraq searching for an armless boy who makes predictions). It's a messy film but is strangely lyrical and moving, as it paints its ugly picture of a war-torn country that was promised by Bush that this war would make things better. The final shot of the once optimistic Satellite, now on crutches from a minefield explosion, turning his back on the American soldiers passing through his village, the same soldiers he a short time ago welcomed as the saviors of his people, tells us how that optimism has faded.

This film had a lot to live up to. It is the very first feature film to be filmed after the overthrow of the Saddam regime. On top of that it is directed by the Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi whose previous film I saw was MAROONED IN IRAQ , a film that whilst noble left me with the feeling of close but no cigar. I have to confess from what I've seen of Iranian New Wave I'm not really a fan of the movement but will confess that I've never been a fan of the Italian Neorealist movement that inspired it but TURTLES CAN FLY has had almost universal praise and being set in Iraqi Kurdistan , a place I have visited and a place that treated me as an all conquering hero despite doing absolutely nothing heroic over there I thought I'd owe it to both Kurdistan and myself to watch it Certainly from the opening scene your expectations are raised and seems radically different from other realist films from the region . A young girl stands on the edge of a cliff and non diagetic music plays , music being played over a scene isn't something associated with cinematic realism . As the story continues we're introduced to the characters which are exclusively children - and a cast of non professional actors - who stand in a refugee camp between the Iraqi border with Turkey One thing the film does do fairly well is give an international audience what life is like for the Kurds from the period . Where's all the adults you ask ? Buried in mass graves by Arab Ba'athists probably and the vast majority of them were alive and kicking before the earth got bulldozed on top of them. It also touches upon other bits of darker Kurdish rural culture such as blood feuds etc and perhaps best of all lives up to the Kurdish mantra that "The only friends we (The Kurds) have are the mountains" . However I did find it all rather uninvolving which is surprising given the topic . Possibly it might all be down to the fact that the last film I saw was CRIMSON GOLD which is an exceptional film from the Iranian New Wave

This movie is insane. Insanely funny and insanely heartbreaking. I almost forgot that I was in my senior high when the war in Iraq happened. This movie just brought back the fact I read from the newspaper, only it's much more tangible and terrifying. How this was all happening? Why would they want this? Right, some people are just plain selfish.I never thought that war would be this staggering. Especially how it affects children. And the fact that this movie is made by the persons who literally live there brings more emotion to it. Wow. The world out there is so cruel but it is sad actually to see they made me smile and laugh in some parts of the movie. What an irony.The life of Agrin and Hengov is extremely frightening. So inhuman. How could they did that to them? They're brothers, aren't they? My God, they're living hell out there. I really hope there will never be any crazy war like this again on this earth. Let's fill this world with peace only. No more war. NO MORE!