Turtles Can Fly: The Forgotten Children

For most of us distanced from the ravages of wars, we grimace at TV images of human carnage and suffering, but the impacts soon fade into oblivion the moment we turn off the TV. The assault on our conscience is a fleeting one, soon overshadowed by our daily grind.

Consciously or not, we tend to shut off images of human suffering, presumably because such a state of mind is seemingly incongruous with us being nicely ensconced in the comfort of home. We have the luxury of making choices, preferring happy outcomes, both for us and for others. And that freedom of choice is exercised daily in movie selection, for example.

After a hard day's work, we can't be faulted with seeking a little outlet for our pent-up stress, and what better way to do that than in the form of an entertaining visual/audio escapade as offered by the celluloid screen, so we rationalize. Rarely do we choose a movie genre that is likely to prick our conscience, less so a docu-drama that brings us back down to earth, traumatically at times, unless per chance we bump into one. And this was the milieu in which we found ourselves one fine day not too long ago while channel surfing.

I think we just miss the starting credit and therefore did not know the title until the end credits came up. The first scene was a group of boys led by one precocious bespectacled kid haggling with the seller for a huge satellite disc in the shop. We could not understand the dialog, nor able to place the language origin. But the dubbing saved the day. The next scene showed the boys pushing the satellite disc on the kid’s bicycle, colorfully festooned with ribbons.

We had the urge to move along, seldom settling for a foreign movie, unless it’s Chinese. But for some reason we stayed on and by the time the armless kid with his somber-faced sister, with a little, seemingly blind, brother (and so we thought) in tow, appeared, we were glued.

The setting is a Kurdish refugee camp, somewhere at the border of Iraq/Turkey. The time was just prior to the US invasion of Iraq. The adults seemed to just laze around while the more enterprising kids scouted the area for intact land mines to sell.

There was a budding love story in there somewhere, but decidedly one-sided as the girl, the sister of the armless kid, hardly responded to the advances from Satellite (that’s the nickname of the leader of the marauding kid gang). Through several back flashes, we began to know the reason for the girl’s perennially depressed state of mind, and her silent struggle between caring for and rejecting her little brother, who turned up to be her son born as a result of soldier rape.

The poignancy of the wars waged by adults driven by ideological and geopolitical imperatives was laid bare by this microcosm of war-torn life eked out by a bunch of innocent children, by all accounts. In the end, the girl took her own life, jumping off from a high cliff, and receiving complete liberation from a life of destitute. Perhaps this is one facet of the symbolism projected by the film’s title: Turtles Can Fly.

On a more positive note, that the children, despite their dire circumstances, could still go about their business day in and day out must be a testimony to the indefatigable spirit of the young, who have not seen anything better (except for the MTV via satellite TV reception). For us removed from the scene of the specter, this must appear impossible. How could they still find meaning in life? I venture that these kids must believe that turtles can fly, and that tomorrow is another day to look forward to.

I think even the most callous of soul will be moved by the plight of these children. We complain about slow service, traffic jam, inconsiderate neighbors, scheming colleagues, unjust discriminations of all sorts. But all these pale in comparison with the portrayal in the film, revealing how petty we have become. The common refrain of not taking things for granted just sounds that much louder. And no matter how decrepit our life would become, there will always be people somewhere in the world much worse off and deserving of our compassion beyond mere empathy.