Marie Valla in Newsweek:
Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi discusses his new movie—the first filmed in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein—and the cruel world of Iraqi children:
“Turtles Can Fly,” the first feature film set in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, could be Bahman Ghobadi’s ticket to the Oscars. The Kurdish-Iranian director’s third film bittersweetly chronicles the life of a village waiting for war to erupt. While adults watch events unfold on American cable-news channels, children try to make a few bucks collecting land mines. Their self-proclaimed leader, a boy called Satellite, falls in love with the enigmatic and ever-escaping Agrin, who flees the brutality of war with her armless brother and a blind toddler in tow. But tragedy, it turns out, isn’t so easily outrun.
Read the interview here.