Beyond the Multiplex

"Turtles Can Fly": Love among the ruins -- also satellite TV
This is the latest extraordinary film from Bahman Ghobadi, the Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker who makes features in the treacherous borderlands of Iran, Iraq and Turkey, recruiting local people (especially children and teenagers) to play themselves, more or less. (His previous films include "A Time for Drunken Horses" and "Songs of My Motherland," which might be at your video store under the title "Marooned in Iraq.") These aren't documentaries -- they're scripted films with fictional plots -- but "Turtles Can Fly" will bring you closer to what it's actually like to live in an Iraqi refugee camp than anything you're likely to see on the news.

Fair warning: Ghobadi takes a dim view, reasonably enough, of both Saddam Hussein and the American war that unseated him. Although "Turtles Can Fly" is a lyrical, often lovely film with touches of humor, it's also a remorseless tragedy that doesn't offer its child protagonists any false redemption. Don't go to this expecting to see these kids get rescued by G.I. Joe and then stride off into a prosperous, well-nourished future.

Satellite (Soran Ebrahim) is the entrepreneurial wizard of this particular refugee camp, which is just inside Iraq on the Turkish border. As his moniker suggests, this bespectacled 13-year-old specializes in installing satellite dishes so villagers can watch the news on CNN -- not, of course, so that they can watch MTV, "Baywatch" and all the other lascivious content forbidden to good Muslims. He organizes teams of kids to clear minefields, which accounts for the numerous children with one arm or one leg (remember, these aren't actors and there are no special effects), or to collect empty artillery shells to sell as scrap.

Satellite nearly comes to blows, if that's the right word, with an older boy named Henkov (Hirsh Feyssal), who has no arms at all but challenges his authority. Realizing that Henkov's sister is the strange, long-faced beauty named Agrin (Avaz Latif) who has recently shown up in the camp, Satellite tries to make peace, but the newcomers remain silent and keep their distance. Meanwhile, Ghobadi begins to show us Agrin's terrible story too, which includes the fact that the cherubic 3-year-old traveling with her and Henkov isn't their younger brother.

It's the spring of 2003, and what both Fox News and Henkov foresee -- he has the gift of prophecy, or so it's said -- is that American troops will soon arrive and Saddam, scourge of the Kurds, will pass into history. But by the end of the film, when Satellite stands on the roadside watching the American tanks flow past (as far as I can tell, this footage is not fictional), there is no reason to celebrate. This unsinkable little capitalist has had his heart broken, and yours will be too.

"Turtles Can Fly" opens this week in Los Angeles and New York, March 4 in Philadelphia, March 18 in Houston, and April 1 in Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington, with other cities to follow.

"Cinévardaphoto": A lifetime of photography -- in a movie

I was too flattened by a dread virus to meet with Agnès Varda when she passed through New York this week, which was a real drag because A) she's a legend of French film who's now 76, and while I certainly hope she has 15 or 20 years ahead of her, we never really know, and B) she's a hoot. Someone I know who did talk to her said she broke off the interview after a few minutes and went and told the guy who was vacuuming the hotel lobby to come right over and vacuum right next to them, instead of being polite and keeping his distance.

Varda was in town to talk about "Cinévardaphoto," an anthology of three short films that remind us that she isn't just the director of "Cleo From 5 to 7" and "Vagabond" and "One Sings, the Other Doesn't" (and also the widow of the great Jacques Demy), she's also a lifelong photographer and photography enthusiast. The audience for "Cinévardaphoto" won't be huge, but for photo buffs and Varda fans, it's a can't-miss.

The first, newest and oddest film in "Cinévardaphoto" is "Ydessa, the Bears and Etc.," an exploration of the spooky, obsessive world of Canadian artist Ydessa Hendeles, who has accumulated the world's largest collection (I presume) of family photos that include teddy bears, along with many of the actual bears so depicted. The overcrowded exhibit she puts together at a Munich gallery is something of a shocker; let's just say that Hendeles' own past, as the child of Holocaust survivors, isn't irrelevant, and neither is the site, a building designed to hold the cultural treasures of the Third Reich.

Next comes "Ulysse," a film made in the early '80s that examines a photo Varda herself took almost 30 years earlier, of a man, a boy and a dead goat on a stony French beach. She tracks down the people depicted, propounds her own theories on the photo's symbolism, asks random children what they make of it, sums up the major news events of that month in 1954. As she would freely admit, none of this really explains anything, but it weaves the fabric of a passionate, introspective, meditative life out of a single inscrutable image.

Last comes "Salut les cubains," which depending on your perspective is an exercise in pure photographic form or in Commie nostalgia kitsch. Supporting the Cuban Revolution in 1963, when Varda assembled this film out of the photos she'd taken on a trip to Fidel Castro's island, was surely no crime -- it looked like a tropical, rumba-infused, far less dogmatic version of Marxism. Varda's photography is a pure joy, but rereleasing this film four decades later, absent any commentary on the ironic distance between then and now, is a typically challenging gesture. Is she still the radical-chic warrior she was then? Is she trying to confront Americans with our own hypocrisies? Whatever she's got in mind, Agnès Varda doesn't want us to be comfortable.

"Cinévardaphoto" opens this week at Film Forum in New York.

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