Reel life, real stories, Bahman Ghobadi 23.8.2005

It's an intense, moving, sometimes blackly comic narrative, not about the war, but about those affected by it.

Turtles Can Fly focuses on the lives of refugee children on the Iran-Iraq border, on a group of abandoned, damaged yet remarkably resourceful boys and girls whose chief source of income is landmines. They find and retrieve mines, at considerable danger to themselves. The mines are then sold, recycled and redeployed.

This trade - which seems like the stuff of nightmares, or the most terrible of metaphors - actually happens, it seems.

"It is a metaphor, and it is a tragedy," says Ghobadi. "The whole region is like that. But if you just think of the tragedy, you will die. The metaphor sustains you."

That, he says, is where storytelling comes in: it can be a response to reality that brings something more to it, that has the potential to transform it.

For Turtles Can Fly, Ghobadi came to Iraq with a script barely 10 pages long, needing to cast and find locations in a couple of months. His young actors are locals - only one of them had ever seen TV - and they were unaware of the filmmaking process, or of what cinema was.

Ghobadi says he spent time living alongside them to establish a connection. He told them little in advance about their characters, or the plot of the film, concerned that they would make up their minds in advance about what they thought or felt: he preferred to work from scene to scene, and get immediate reactions. "When they are playing a role, it is reliving their lives, their stories in the film are so close to reality," he says.

One of his youngest cast members was blind: Ghobadi was subsequently able to help arrange for an operation to restore his sight. "It was," he says, "the best day of my life."

On his return home, he has a gruelling schedule ahead of him: four films, including one to be shot in Turkey, plus works by colleagues that he has some involvement with. And he has another cinematic project: building movie houses in Iraqi Kurdistan. This isn't a moneymaking venture, he says.

"It will be a major loss, and it will take two or three years of my life. But I have no other alternative but to build these cinemas. I try to persuade people to build movie houses and theatres, to help to develop Kurdish culture, I tell them it's a source of strength."

But, Ghobadi says, the message doesn't seem to get through. "I have been meeting with people with money and influence, to try to encourage them to nurture culture, but they are more interested in money, in economic matters." He's also met government officials - and the Iraqi President, a Kurd - to urge the case for culture.

He tries to train people on every film he makes - he wants to encourage Kurdish filmmakers to emerge, to tell their own stories - but he looks a little weary as he talks about his mission.

"I am so agitated about the issues of film, so enthusiastic, that it has impacted on me both physically and emotionally. I can't say that I'm a healthy person - my life is basically dedicated to this endeavour."

Turtles Can Fly is now screening.

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