Turtles Can Fly is an eerie production that, even in pounding rain, is dominated by a ethereal light. There’s a chilled beauty to images that contrast the story’s inherent misery. As you might expect from a film set during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, this is no bundle of laughs. In Kurdistan, an enterprising teenager installs satellite dishes: Saddam has blocked local TV and villagers want to know where the war is. Meanwhile, a crippled boy is worried about a future he can predict and a sister who wants to leave him. Two stories are fighting for dominance here, an aggression that unsettles a story that is, arguably, less eloquent than Ghobadi’s A Time for Drunken Horses. But it’s a minor quibble. This is by all measures a startling achievement.

Turtles Can Fly is a reflection of a place CNN forgot, but it’s also a story about nurture in adversity. Satellite, as the teenager is known, cares for a tribe of urchins who clear land-mines and are fed from the profit of sale. In this pre-apocalyptic world, needs must and children’s limbs are expendable. Despite the overwhelming despair, Ghobadi imbues his allegorical story with a delicate humour, such as Satellite’s discordant romance or the villager’s desire for ‘reliable’ information through Fox News. It’s a bitter irony that knocks the film into goal. Ghodabi dedicates Turtles Can Fly to ‘innocent children - the casualties of the policies of dictators and fascists’, no doubt referring to both Saddam and Bush. If all independent filmmakers were half this good.

 // COLIN FRASER