WAR BABIES

REVIEWED - TURTLES CAN FLY/LAKPOSHTHA HÂM PARVAZ MIKONAND: BAHMAN Ghobadi, the Kurdish director of the emotionally devastating A Time for Drunken Horses, once again focuses on the plight of children forced to grow old before their time in this harrowing drama set at the beginning of the US invasion of Iraq.

Turtles Can Fly deals in such gloomy imagery (limbless youngsters collect landmines to exchange for machine guns) and is infused with such a jaundiced view of geopolitics that one could be forgiven for classing it as an exercise in pessimism. But, in the person of a boy named Satellite (Soran Ebrahim), Ghobadi offers us a hero whose ingenuity and perseverance tell encouraging stories about the strength of the human spirit.

The picture is set in and about a refugee camp that has grown up next to a Kurdish village near the border between Iraq and Turkey. Satellite, so named because he has some talent for manipulating TV antennae to receive western news channels, is the unofficial leader of a group of orphaned children who scratch precarious livings plucking mines from the grey, rocky earth.

One day three strangers arrive: a blind infant, an introspective teenage girl and a boy with no arms, who may be clairvoyant. The travellers' story, terrible snatches of which are revealed in startlingly brief flashbacks, stands for that of the Kurdish people.

Turtles Can Fly, whose damp, virtually monochrome cinematography fairly deadens the soul, impressively combines uncomplicated folk rhythms with an angry, distraught tone to produce a fable that grips like a thriller.