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The film
‘Turtles can fly’ by the Kurdish Director Bahman Gobadi won the Golden
Shell; Xu Jinglei received the Silver Shell for best director; and Connie
Nielsen and Ulrich Thomson got best actor awards for their work in the film
‘Brødre’.  
See the film here!! click the poster
DONOSTIA (San Sebastian) - Clutching his Golden Shell that he had won for
the film Turtles can fly the Kurdish director Bahman Gobadi said in Basque:
“Mila esker eta beti arte” (Thank you very much and farewell). During the
closing event at the Kursaal last night there was a prolonged round of
applause for the winner of the best film award in this year’s Donostia-San
Sebastian International Film Festival. The same scene was repeated in the
afternoon. Critics and reporters clapped enthusiastically when Mario Vargas
Llosa, the president of the international jury, announced the winner.
The top film tells what it was like in the aftermath of the war against Iraq
through the eyes of Kurdish children. “I want to dedicate this prize to all
the children in the film; to all Kurds throughout the world; and to the film
production and people of Iran.” The filmmaker, who lives in Teheran, said he
hoped that the Golden Shell would boost Iranian film production. There was
also warm applause for Goran Paskaljevic’s Sam Zimske Noci, which got the
special jury prize. The Serbian director also said that the award would help
film production in his country. This was the only film the jury members gave
their opinion on, pointing out that it was “for the way it evokes the tragic
consequences of a civil conflict by means of the relationship between a
survivor and an autistic girl”.
There was applause, but whistling as well, during yesterday afternoon’s
press conference when it was announced that the Silver Shell for Best
Director had been awarded to Xu Jinglei for the film Yi geng mo sheng nu ren
de lai xin (letter from an unknown woman). But there was not that much.
There was more whistling when the announcement came that the Jury Award for
Best Photography had gone to the photography director of the film Nine Songs
directed by Michael Winterbottom. In the award-giving ceremony in the
evening Kieran O’Brien, the principal actor in the film, received the prize
on behalf of Marcel Zyskind, the photography director.
Just like last year, two actors in the same film received the Silver Shell
prizes for Best Actor: Connie Nielsen and Ulrich Thomsen, the two who played
the leading roles in the film Brødre (Brothers). They both attended the
prize-giving ceremony and thanked Susanne Bier, who directed the film about
the consequences of war, for having been given the opportunity to act in the
film. The Best Screenplay Award went to the film Omagh which many had tipped
as one of the favourites for the Golden Shell. The screenplay writer Guy
Hibbert received the prize on his and Paul Greengrass’s behalf. “It’s five
years since the Omagh attack, but for the victims and their families it is
as if it happened yesterday,” said Hibbert.
The film “Roma” by Adolfo Aristarain, regarded as a favourite by critics and
the media, failed to win any awards. So the film is this year’s main loser.
Berria
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'These are the people we never
see on TV'
A new film reveals how the war hit a corner of Iraq the world had
overlooked: Kurdistan. Michael Howard meets its director
Thursday January 6, 2005
The Guardian
Turtles Can Fly: 'An anti-war movie without slogans.'
As a Kurd, Bahman Gobadi knows that opportunity can grow out of tragedy.
That belief helps to explain why, two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein
in the spring of 2003, he slipped across the border from his native Iran and
headed for Baghdad. With him he carried a copy of his second feature film,
Marooned in Iraq, a road movie about a group of Iranian-Kurdish musicians
seeking lost love in Saddam's benighted land.
Article continues
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"I wanted to be the first to screen a film in Baghdad after the removal of
the great dictator," he said last week in Arbil, the main Iraqi Kurdish
city. "Being caught watching such a movie under the former regime would have
almost certainly meant death. I was so delighted that Saddam had gone."
But Gobadi had also packed a small video camera, which whirred away as he
passed through scores of impoverished Kurdish villages en route to the
capital. Back in Tehran after the screening, he looked at the footage. "What
I saw was startling: a land full of mines and refugee tents and disabled
children ... arms sellers, abandoned tanks, mortars." He couldn't sleep.
"Every time I closed my eyes, I was haunted by those images. There was
something telling me to go back and make another movie. So I smuggled myself
back over the border and started work."
This was the beginning of Turtles Can Fly, the first feature film to emerge
from post-Saddam Iraq. It is a powerful cry on behalf of children everywhere
caught up in despotism and war. Filmed on location last winter, using
minimal equipment in the mountainous terrain of Iraqi Kurdistan, Turtles
paints a radically different picture of life in Iraq from the one most
western audiences have seen on their news channels. Gobadi is a deeply
political film-maker, but his nuanced approach skillfully avoids the naive
blustering of many on the anti-war left. "It is an anti-war movie without
slogans." He chose the title in part, he says, because "people might think
it was some kind of Disney film".
As with A Time for Drunken Horses, his acclaimed first film, the central
characters are children. They are all first-time actors, some with serious
physical disabilities, from whom Gobadi has coaxed astonishing performances.
The story follows a group of Iraqi Kurdish orphans in a refugee camp on the
Turkish border on the eve of the US-led invasion. The children carry the
physical and mental scars of life under Saddam's regime with stoicism and
not a little humour.
Gobadi's aim, he says, was to present a portrait of the "pain and
surrealism" of war and its effects on Iraqis with "naturalness and honesty".
"These are the people we never see or hear from on TV," he says. "President
Bush and Saddam had become the superstars on the satellite channels. Iraqi
people were just extras. So I wanted my stars to be the children, with
Saddam and Bush in the background."
Turtles Can Fly is as bold a presentation of the Kurdish experience as has
appeared on the big screen since the great Turkish Kurdish director Yilmaz
Guney made Yol. And it has clearly touched a nerve among Iraq's Kurds.
A week after the film's premiere in Arbil, Gobadi still bore the bruises
from what he described as "the astonishing reaction" of the audience. "They
almost hugged me to death," he said. "I was telling a part of their pain and
their memories. I take it as a compliment. If they had not believed what was
in the film, they would not have reacted like that."
It is Gobadi's biggest production to date, involving thousands of Kurdish
villagers as extras, as well as real US soldiers and helicopters. And he
admits that without the help of the Kurdish Regional Government, led by
Nechirvan Barzani, the film would never have been made. "We didn't have the
money, or any sophisticated equipment, so their help made the difference."
Filming was tough, he says. "We endured hours of freezing weather, filming
in the mud and the mountains. And believe me, what these children did in my
film and put up with for my film, the Hollywood children could never do. The
children were acting their lives. That's why they seem so real."
Gobadi was born in 1969 in the border town of Baneh in Iranian Kurdistan. As
a student, he worked for a radio station before joining a group of amateur
film-makers in the city Sanandaj. With their help, he directed his first
short films.
In Tehran, where he had moved to attend film classes (he dropped out before
graduating), Gobadi directed a number of award-winning short films. In 1999,
he was Abbas Kiarostami's first assistant on The Wind Will Carry Us, which
proved a crucial stepping stone. For Turtles he teamed up once more with
cameraman Shahriar Assadi - "He's a Kurd at heart" - and persuaded Hussein
Alizadeh, one of Iran's leading composers, to provide the eerily beautiful
soundtrack.
Variety magazine recently dubbed Gobadi "the poet laureate of the Kurdish
cinema". Yet he dismisses talk of a Kurdish cinema as premature. "When we
have cinemas in every Kurdish town, and when Kurdish language and culture on
film is no longer viewed as a rare and exotic bird by the film community,
perhaps then we can talk of a Kurdish cinema. I want to register the Kurds
on the cultural map."
Gobadi now lives in Tehran, because that is where the Iranian film industry
is based. "But it's just my body that lives there," he says. "My spirit and
my heart are in Kurdistan."
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