Turtles Can Fly: Hina Anwar

Turtles Can Fly, was a heart wrenching film to watch. The film had an even greater impact because the main characters were all children, which most if not all audiences can sympathize with. When it starts out, it has a kind of cheerful tone with the children helping arrange antennas and trying to get a satellite dish, but then it soon takes a turn for the worse. You find out that some of the children are missing limbs because of all the mines that are still left around and that there are various refugees from the ongoing war. What made it even harder to watch was that these were innocent children, they had done nothing wrong. I doubt they could even conceptualize what war actually is. I suppose that was the point: to tell the story of a Diaspora through the eyes of the most innocent members or in this case victims.

For such a harsh story, there is so much innocence in the film. Films about Diaspora usually show the impact it has on adults because they have the most to say and we think children can’t really understand what’s going on. However, Turtles Can Fly really shows what some of them go through and things like stepping on landmines actually do happen to them. It was just so hard to watch. I guess I should have realized after seeing a little girl jumping a cliff, the movie was going to be sad. Sympathizing with children is just so easy to do and the fact that the children acted normally just made it worse. Landmines existing were the norm and things like foreign soldiers invading were interesting to them.

Looking at the film through American eyes made it all the worse. Americans were the ones fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place. To know that we were helping people at the cost of ruining the lives of others was just too much.  People were forced to leave there homes and families. They lost everything and it was partially our fault. War is terrible on all fronts, but this movie just showed how bad it is for the people on the other side.

According to the article by Michael Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto diasporic films are meant to challenge the loss identity not just of the people, but the nations affected as a whole. I think the director, Ghobadi, did just that. Some of the children in the film are refugees and they can only hold onto their broken families. They no longer worry about superficial things like looking nice, they are no longer themselves. They have become refugees. Nothing else matters but surviving.   It really helped the viewer see what the country was going through as well. Many villages didn’t even know what was going on, only that there was a war. They had no way of communicating with other nations and you could even say that they were just the target. Regardless of the fact that there were many innocent people in Iraq, we chose to only see the bad. Overall the movie made me want to cry. It was so depressing, but that’s what made it have such an impact on me. People tend to remember the bad, more often than the good after all.