Film: From Iraq: Turtles Can Fly

Turtles Can Fly
Directed by Bahman Ghobadi
IFC

This film is astondingly beautiful, haunting and heartbreaking. As our government tries to sort out what to do in Iraq, this movie shows what a huge impact war makes and that there are no easy answers. I can't recommend it enough.

Here's what Jessica Winter of the Village Voice says about it and the link to the full article

Goodbye, Children
In first film from post-Saddam Iraq, refugee kids missing parents and limbs eke out a living by Jessica Winter

Saddam Hussein belongs to a fecund Iranian cinema tradition, in which the experiences of kids double as allegories or microcosms of the society at large. So when a girl jumps off a cliff to her death in the flash-forwarded opening of Turtles Can Fly, there's no doubt that the void she leaps into is the region's foreseeable future. In Bahman Ghobadi's third film, set on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom and shot in a refugee camp on the Iraq-Turkey border, a boy can take on the role of parent, manager, translator, or paramedic; in early scenes, de facto youth leader Soran (Soran Ebrahim), a/k/a Satellite, is looking for a TV dish so everyone can find out when the U.S. invasion starts. link to the full article