Turtles Can Fly · reception & legacy
2004 · Bahman Ghobadi
How Turtles Can Fly has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It arrived as an urgent dispatch — winning the Golden Shell at San Sebastián in 2004 and championed by critics as the first look inside post-Saddam Iraq — and has since settled into a different kind of fame: a fixture of 'most devastating films ever made' lists that each new wave of Letterboxd users discovers, braces for, and is wrecked by anyway.
What's debated
The perennial debate is whether its relentless bleakness is essential witness or misery overload — 'masterpiece, but I can never watch it again' is practically the official review.
Its footprint
It's the canonical 'this film will destroy you' recommendation — the one people invoke when ranking cinema's great gut-punches — and its images of refugee children harvesting landmines for cash have become shorthand for war's cost falling on the young.
Where it stands
A cornerstone of Kurdish cinema and a quietly towering entry in the Letterboxd tearjerker canon — less name-dropped than it deserves, but a 'you haven't seen it?' film among those who have.