Tonight I watched another Iranian film "Turtles Can Fly", a film about war and children depicted by Gobadi. In the film, the confrontation of arms, the pursuit and killing, the brutal blood and flesh are rarely seen, and the shock that can be brought is like embroidering a red flower directly on the fingernail with a needle through the finger. My feeling for this movie is gray, but it is the gray and white after the rain. Pure, thorough, a little sad and helpless.
The film begins with the outcome of the story, which can’t be described as a flashback: a close-up of a girl’s face, steadfast in her crimson dress. Then zoom out and shoot from a high angle: the gray-blue sky, the high cliffs, the clouds in the sky move obviously, showing a sense of oppression in cool colors. Then close-up the jumping of the feet... The
director seems to like to use the high-angle tilt shot in the medium shot, and rarely use close-up. The feeling of this kind of shooting is depressing. For example, the encounter between a "Satellite" and a girl is that the girl carries a child on her back and looks up at the "Satellite" that is carrying a satellite, making the originally short girl thinner and the child on her back even more abrupt.
Only later did I know that this child was not her brother but her child, a child born after being gang-raped by an American soldier, and the child was born with eye problems. The little girl's brother had his hands blown off, but he was a prophet. Every time he revealed his prophecy, it would bring bad luck to the family of three.
In general, the language in the movie will more or less carry the director's own thoughts. For example, there is a scene where "satellites" dispatch a group of children to help remove landmines. A few children were selected. The villagers asked, why are these children all over the place? Most of them have less arms, "Satellite" replied loudly, this is our elite, they dare to continue to work without arms, they are not afraid of landmines. There are also pictures that reflect the simplicity of this small village, whether it's a child being kissed by a girl when he was crying, or a "Satellite" crying and being kissed by an old man after his leg was blown up, which gives people a warm comfort, as if they were back home. When I was a child, I kissed me when I was in pain, and everything would pass.
Does the turtle in "The Flying Turtle" refer to the brother who lacks arms? There was a prophet who was looking at the drowned body of a child in the water, and the prophet's stump arm made him look like a turtle. At the end of the film, did the prophetic "tortoise" really fly into the sky?
Did the tortoise refer to the child? Young life, big eyes with disease, the happiest time he laughed was when he was next to a puddle with his mother and uncle, and he threw the two turtles in his hands into the puddle. This child who should never have come to this world finally flew into the sky, a paradise on the water.
Could the turtle be referring to the little girl? Strong but fragile, she bears a lot of pressure, carrying a hard shell on her back, walking with difficulty step by step. Her shell is her child, the shell brought by the war, and the source of all pain. But when a turtle takes off its shell, it also dies.
Finally, will the turtle be a "satellite"? His responsibility is to install satellites in the village, take care of all the children in the village, lead them to work and lead them to escape, and also bear the counterattack to resist the war attack. Finally, 257 days after the prophet brought words to the "satellite", there will be new changes in this place.
The film begins a few weeks before the outbreak of the US-Iraq war.
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