By Marcus Simmons

Hailed as one of the most emotionally arresting and visually stunning productions of the modern film era, Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly is the first feature film to be shot in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein. In this movie, set on the Iraqi-Turkish border, 13-year-old Soran "Satellite" Ebrahim becomes the hope of a Kurdish village, due to his ability to install satellite dishes and translate English messages of the impending U.S. invasion. Organizing task-forces of fellow orphans into groups to defuse and collect landmines, he encounters a clairvoyant boy and his beautiful, yet mysterious sister.

What follows next, is a powerful interplay of life, laughter, death, and hope. According to the Boston Herald, "Ghobadi magically transforms modern-day Kurdistan into a grotesque wonderland and the raw material of the bloody conflicts in Iraq into a fairy tale that is tragic, haunting and often oddly beautiful." Simply put, Turtles Can Fly is a film that demands the kind of emotional, mental, and spiritual investment that is often absent in so many of the popular cookie-cutter productions of the present.

While trying to wrap my head around the film, these words came:

This is more than anything I've seen before.
This is much more.
There are no sun-kissed, dark-haired, veiled objects of western exotic imagination.
There are no indignant babbling bald heads wrapped in cloth and crowned with turbans.
The wet, shouting masses who burn flags and sacrifice the innocent are no more than crying children.
Girls who have had their innocence drowned in a sea of lust and blind conquest, will be forced to become women long before time plans a place for them to rest.
Boys crawl through barbed wire and blind babies splash in puddles of their parents blood.
No, this is something different.
Airplanes whistle over head, filled with drunken heroes, while angels rock cold and hungry orphans to sleep.
Children learn math, science, and marksmanship in the middle of minefields.
This is not a story about "them." It is a prophecy for us.
It is spirit connecting with heart; transformed into light that kills the dark places and puts death and demons to flight.
It is the flight of turtles.