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A new
film reveals how the war hit a corner of Iraq the
world had overlooked: Kurdistan. Michael Howard
meets its director
As a Kurd, Bahman Gobadi knows that opportunity can
grow out of tragedy. That belief helps to explain
why, two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein in
the spring of 2003, he slipped across the border
from his native Iran and headed for Baghdad. With
him he carried a copy of his second feature film,
Marooned in Iraq, a road movie about a group of
Iranian-Kurdish musicians seeking lost love in
Saddam's benighted land.
"I wanted to be the first to screen a film in
Baghdad after the removal of the great dictator," he
said last week in Arbil, the main Iraqi Kurdish
city. "Being caught watching such a movie under the
former regime would have almost certainly meant
death. I was so delighted that Saddam had gone."
But Gobadi had also packed a small video camera,
which whirred away as he passed through scores of
impoverished Kurdish villages en route to the
capital. Back in Tehran after the screening, he
looked at the footage. "What I saw was startling: a
land full of mines and refugee tents and disabled
children ... arms sellers, abandoned tanks,
mortars." He couldn't sleep. "Every time I closed my
eyes, I was haunted by those images. There was
something telling me to go back and make another
movie. So I smuggled myself back over the border and
started work."
This was the beginning of Turtles Can Fly, the first
feature film to emerge from post-Saddam Iraq. It is
a powerful cry on behalf of children everywhere
caught up in despotism and war. Filmed on location
last winter, using minimal equipment in the
mountainous terrain of Iraqi Kurdistan, Turtles
paints a radically different picture of life in Iraq
from the one most western audiences have seen on
their news channels. Gobadi is a deeply political
film-maker, but his nuanced approach skillfully
avoids the naive blustering of many on the anti-war
left. "It is an anti-war movie without slogans." He
chose the title in part, he says, because "people
might think it was some kind of Disney film".
As with A Time for Drunken Horses, his acclaimed
first film, the central characters are children.
They are all first-time actors, some with serious
physical disabilities, from whom Gobadi has coaxed
astonishing performances. The story follows a group
of Iraqi Kurdish orphans in a refugee camp on the
Turkish border on the eve of the US-led invasion.
The children carry the physical and mental scars of
life under Saddam's regime with stoicism and not a
little humour.
Gobadi's aim, he says, was to present a portrait of
the "pain and surrealism" of war and its effects on
Iraqis with "naturalness and honesty". "These are
the people we never see or hear from on TV," he
says. "President Bush and Saddam had become the
superstars on the satellite channels. Iraqi people
were just extras. So I wanted my stars to be the
children, with Saddam and Bush in the background."
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."
Gobadi was born in 1969 in the border town of Baneh
in Iranian Kurdistan. As a student, he worked for a
radio station before joining a group of amateur
film-makers in the city Sanandaj. With their help,
he directed his first short films.
In Tehran, where he had moved to attend film classes
(he dropped out before graduating), Gobadi directed
a number of award-winning short films. In 1999, he
was Abbas Kiarostami's first assistant on The Wind
Will Carry Us, which proved a crucial stepping
stone. For Turtles he teamed up once more with
cameraman Shahriar Assadi - "He's a Kurd at heart" -
and persuaded Hussein Alizadeh, one of Iran's
leading composers, to provide the eerily beautiful
soundtrack.
Variety magazine recently dubbed Gobadi "the poet
laureate of the Kurdish cinema". Yet he dismisses
talk of a Kurdish cinema as premature. "When we have
cinemas in every Kurdish town, and when Kurdish
language and culture on film is no longer viewed as
a rare and exotic bird by the film community,
perhaps then we can talk of a Kurdish cinema. I want
to register the Kurds on the cultural map."
Gobadi now lives in Tehran, because that is where
the Iranian film industry is based. "But it's just
my body that lives there," he says. "My spirit and
my heart are in Kurdistan."
· Turtles Can Fly is released tomorrow.
http://www.guardian.co.uk .
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