Through a Kurdish Lens
Garcia, Maria
Through a Kurdish Lens By Maria Garcia Kurdistan may still be a "lost horizon" for Kurds, an elusive utopia, a homeland vitiated by the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, but Bahman Ghobadi...
...He calls the war "a game," and says Bush and the United States are in Iraq only for oil...
...This is symbolic for me of the joy and anguish and migration of the Kurds...
...But he adds, more soberly, "Despite everything, I have put all of my hopes onto the children of Kurdistan...
...It is as if it is really Armageddon here...
...They act like they are thirty or forty years old...
...In Marooned in Iraq (2003), Ghobadi charted the Kurds' collective memory of migration and genocide through the story of Mirza, an elderly man who journeys across Iran to rescue his beloved ex-wife stranded at the Iraqi border...
...Satellite's indus-triousness and resiliency are poignant in contrast to the poverty of his surroundings, but they are thrown into high relief when he falls in love with Agrin, and imagines his future...
...Marooned in Iraq, despite its almost all-male cast, joins Dariush Mehrjui's Leila, Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards (in which Ghobadi was an actor), and Marzieh Meshkini's The Day I Became a Woman as among the strongest recent tributes to women to emerge from Iran...
...And then there is the young woman, Agrin, sister to the armless boy, Hengov, both survivors of Halabja...
...In his third feature, Turtles Can Fly, which is being released in the U.S...
...They do not act like children in the West because they don't have the luxury of having that time to be children...
...The women in Ghobadi's films compel us to consider the lives of people forced to the boundaries of wretchedness by their fellow human beings in the name of political ideology, institutionalized religion, greed, and the Pandora's box of crimes that lead to ethnic cleansing...
...They seem to understand my movies the best...
...Turtles have a very long life," the filmmaker explains...
...Ghobadi's films are especially expressive of the plight of women...
...In Turtles Can Fly, our only glimpse into the future of Kurdistan is Satellite, a boy named for his ability to procure and install satellite dishes...
...In order to know any culture truly, it's important to understand first and foremost the women," Ghobadi explains...
...For now, Tehran is Ghobadi's home when he isn't traveling for his work, but Kurdistan remains his homeland: "When I am in Tehran my full spirit resides in Kurdistan...
...Her brother forces her to keep the child who is a constant reminder of her rape...
...women are left to bear the shame...
...When I was filming near water, the boy without arms reminded me of the turtle and then of the Kurds," he says...
...Through a Kurdish Lens By Maria Garcia Kurdistan may still be a "lost horizon" for Kurds, an elusive utopia, a homeland vitiated by the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, but Bahman Ghobadi knows the way there...
...Hengov can foretell the future from his vivid dreams, and he will not allow Agrin to abandon the blind, lachrymose toddler who lives with them, the child of her soldier-rapist...
...In Saddam's place, they will put another leader similar to him," he declares...
...Visually, Ghobadi connects the turtle that appears in the film, the pet of the blind toddler, to the child's armless uncle...
...Agrin's predicament in Turtles Can Fly is a case in point...
...The most exquisite irony of all is that such a filmmaker finds himself, on the day of our interview, unsure of whether he will be allowed to traverse the border of fear we Americans have erected since 9/11...
...In his first film, A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), Ghobadi led us across the Iran-Iraq border through the eyes of a boy compelled to take over the smuggling business of his father after he is killed by a landmine...
...It is all up in the air right now...
...His childhood was not very different than that of his protagonist in A Time for Drunken Horses...
...Unlike his first two movies, where hope shines faintly but unequivocally, in Turtles Can Fly, we enter Gehenna...
...Its ensemble cast is composed of teenagers, one armless, another blind, another the leader of a gang of children who scout for landmines...
...The Kurds have no more enlightened a view of rape than Westerners have...
...Ghobadi, speaking in a telephone interview from Paris in January (through a Farsi interpreter), reflected on the lugubrious vision of his latest feature...
...The teenager also leads a group of impoverished children who look for valuable landmines, which they can resell at a local market or exchange for guns, radios, and satellite dishes...
...It's all interconnected...
...Then I fear for the children...
...I hope I will see you in New York," Ghobadi avers, referring to the opening here of Turtles Can Fly...
...I love Americans," he declares...
...He was sixteen years old when his parents divorced...
...An Iranian Kurd, Ghobadi was born in Baneh, near Iran's border with Iraq...
...The slow-moving turtle is like the Kurds: With all of our problems, we have managed to move forward, and we always end up upright...
...A week before he is to arrive, his visa is not assured...
...In that long life, they live partly on water and partly on land...
...A Camera d'Or winner at Cannes, it was also one of the first Kurdish-language films...
...His female characters are unflinchingly courageous in the face of incredible travails...
...The irony is that what Hengov perceives as a duty to family-he cannot abandon his nephew-destroys his family and makes him complicit in the state-sanctioned rape of his sister...
...At thirty-six, Ghobadi is still unmarried, but he has very definite ideas about that part of his future...
...Should I get married, my primary objective is to have children," he says, laughing...
...Satellite lives only in the moment, and for a while he is allowed to hope...
...I am not sure how I will find the energy to make my next film...
...I am really quite honestly hopeless," he says...
...Reflecting on the fate of his homeland two weeks before the Iraq election, Ghobadi is rueful...
...Pictured above is the character Satellite from "Turtles Can Fly...
...Satellite's work is in demand just before the war, since villagers are eager to hear news of the arrival of American soldiers...
...A New York City native and intrepid traveler, she would someday like to vacation in the independent state of Kurdistan...
...in March, Ghobadi steers us to a village near the Iran-Iraq border on the verge of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion...
...As the world has been turned upside down, everything is turned upside down-geography, religion, culture," he says...
...Keeping the child puts her in a purgatory from which there is no redemption save death...
...The sister in A Time for Drunken Horses, who marries only after she extracts a promise from the groom's family to pay for her brother's much-needed operation, is simply unforgettable...
...I love children, but you know the children of Kurdistan are not children...
...A concise, elegiac introduction to the history of contemporary Kurdistan, Marooned in Iraq is also an archetypal road movie...
...The film begins with a suicide...
...Giving up the child would resolve Agrin's dilemma: At the very least, she might be able to marry...
...With war imminent, Agrin sees only that the past is about to repeat itself...
...Maria Garcia writes regularly about independent film...
...Now, with the release of Turtles Can Fly, Agrin's visage will be annealed in the minds of all who see the film...
...Hanareh, disfigured in the infamous chemical attack on Halabja, begs Mirza to raise her baby daughter...
...The title, Turtles Can Fly, holds great meaning for Ghobadi...
...I have been looking for a girl like you," he tells her...
...I feel that there is no distance between me as an adult and me as a child," he admits...
Vol. 69 • March 2005 • No. 3
