Turtles Can Fly by Bahman Ghobadi

Bahman Ghobadi was born on February 1st, 1969 in Baneh, province of Kurdistan in Iran. He was the first son of the four born in his family. He got his B.A. in film Directing from the Iranian Broadcasting College.

He lived in Baneh up to age 12. Because of civil disputes, his whole family emigrated to Sanandaj (Center of Kurdistan Province in Iran).

He recieved his diploma in Sanandaj & he came to Tehran in 1992 for his advanced studies. Ghobadi started his artistic career in field of Industrial photography from 1998. He was never properly graduated because he believed every thing he had learned was all from his short films. All this experience helped him to expand his individualistic vision of the world that surrounded him.

He started filmmaking with 8mm. He made a few short documentaries as a starting point.
His short films, as of the mid 1990's, received many foreign & domestic awards. "Life in fog" opened a new opportunity in his career.

This film was accepted for many different International awards & became "The most famous documentary ever made in the history of Iranian cinema".

With the making of the full-length feature 'A Time For Drunken Horses (1999)' he became a recognized professional director all over. This is the first Kurdish full feature film in the history of the Iranian cinema, and Ghobadi is the first Kurdish director in the history Iranian cinema.

A Time For Drunken Horses

Ayoub is a young boy living in a village near the border of Iraq in Kurdistan Province. He works in the bazaar along with his little sister. When his father dies, he is obliged to protect his three sisters and sick brother, Madi.

Madi needs surgery, without which, he is expected to live a maximum of 7 to 8 months. Ayoub tries to smuggle merchandise by mule into Iraq in an attempt to raise money for Madi’s operation.

The owner of the mules refuses to pay Ayoub and his group after the job. Ayoub again looks for a job to pay for his brother's operation. He gets a second chance to smuggle goods using the mule his uncle lends him after breaking his arm.

Rojin, Ayoub's sister, marries a suitor living in a village on the border of Iraq on the condition that he smuggles Madi into Iraq for his operation. Despite Ayoub's objections the wedding takes place and they all move to the border village, including Madi.

The groom's mother prevents Madi from going with them and gives Ayoub a mule as a conciliatory gift. Ayoub and Madi along with the acquired mule return to their native village and sell it to get money for Madi's operation.

- Kurdish Director, Kurdish Filmmaker "Bahman Ghobadi" -

Another Film to this great man, Marooned in Iraq, in which "Mirza", a famous Kurdish musician, hears that his ex-wife Hanare is in trouble.
He accompanied by his two sons, embarks on an adventurous journey across the Iran-Iraq border to find her. They finally find her in a refugee camp, disfigured by the chemical attacks.

One of his best and well-known movies is "Turtles Can Fly".

The first film to be made in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the devastating Turtles Can Fly is set in a Kurdish refugee camp on the Iraqi-Turkish border just before the US invasion in spring 2003.

Director Bahman Ghobadi concentrates on a handful of orphaned children and their efforts to survive the appalling conditions: there's the entrepreneurial Satellite (Soran Ebrahim), the armless clairvoyant Henkov (Hirsh Feyssal), and his traumatised sister Agrin (Avaz Latif), who herself is responsible for a blind toddler.

Dedicated according to the Kurdish Ghobadi:

"To all the innocent children in the world - the casualties of the policies of dictators and fascists".

Turtles Can Fly vividly immerses the viewer in the nightmarish realities of daily existence in this makeshift community that's located within a forbidding natural landscape. There's no running water or electricity, the fear of gas attacks is palpable, and kids use their bare-hands to defuse land mines in the surrounding fields, which they then trade for machine guns at a market.

Turtles Can Fly is as bold a presentation of the Kurdish experience as has appeared on the big screen since the great Turkish Kurdish director Yilmaz Guney made Yol. And it has clearly touched a nerve among Iraq's Kurds.

A week after the film's premiere in Arbil, Gobadi still bore the bruises from what he described as "the astonishing reaction" of the audience. "They almost hugged me to death," he said. "I was telling a part of their pain and their memories. I take it as a compliment. If they had not believed what was in the film, they would not have reacted like that."

It is Gobadi's biggest production to date, involving thousands of Kurdish villagers as extras, as well as real US soldiers and helicopters. And he admits that without the help of the Kurdish Regional Government, led by Nechirvan Barzani, the film would never have been made. "We didn't have the money, or any sophisticated equipment, so their help made the difference."

Filming was tough, he says. "We endured hours of freezing weather, filming in the mud and the mountains. And believe me, what these children did in my film and put up with for my film, the Hollywood children could never do. The children were acting their lives. That's why they seem so real."

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