A VERY HUMAN DRAMA.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

SOME MOVIE IMAGES will never leave your memory. In ``Turtles Can Fly,'' the latest masterpiece from Iranian Kurd Bahman Ghobadi (``Marooned in Iraq,'' ``A Time for Drunken Horses''), it's the sight of an armless adolescent inching along the ground, carefully but expertly digging up a land mine with his mouth.

There are many other indelible scenes in this shatteringly realistic, artfully composed study of children in war. And the drama Ghobadi has worked up complements the profound visuals every heart-wrenching step of the way.

Employing mostly amateurs - the armless boy, Hangao, is played by Hiresh Feysal Rahman, who suffered the same loss - Ghobadi is able to balance unbearable tragedy with everyday kid behavior and a good deal of rough humor. It's staged, but it feels like war as it's lived through.

Set in a tiny Kurdish hamlet on Iraq's barren, muddy border with Turkey during the lead-up to the American invasion, the movie is about survival and giving up. The top survivor in the refugee camp that's as big as the city itself is a boy called Satellite (Soran Ebrahim). His nickname comes from his aptitude with electronics; the villagers are desperate for TV reports about the impending war, and he's the only one who knows how to hook them up to news stations.

With his thick, geeky glasses and goofy, tricked-out bicycle, Satellite doesn't look like a born wheeler-dealer. But he's got a gift for gab and organizes the orphaned refugees' money-making enterprises. Mine-clearing is what passes for big business here; the kids sell them in a nearby city that's one giant arms bazaar. A little Saddam in the making, Satellite is mightily threatened when Hangao arrives and sets up his own business. But Satellite is also knocked for a loop by Hangao's sister Agrin (Avaz Latif), as lovely as she is suicidal.

Agrin brings out the humanity in the infatuated little hustler. Perversely, her own toddler brother, Rega (Abdol Rahman Karim, all of 3 and absolutely devastating), inspires terrifying rage in the sister who dutifully cares for him. And Hangao, who also depends on his sister but loves the toddler passionately, has a gift for seeing the future more accurately than any of those foreign news channels the Kurds can't understand anyway.

``Turtles Can Fly'' suggests that for some people - unwanted children, stateless cultures - no amount of regime change will liberate them from their daily struggle to get by ... nor from the inner demons, grown of their dire situation, who are their true tyrants. Reportedly the first film made in post-Saddam Iraq, ``Turtles Can Fly'' is further proof that Ghobadi is one of those great artists that comes forth during his people's time of crisis.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

TURTLES CAN FLY - Four stars

(Not rated: violence, language, children in jeopardy. In Kurdish with English subtitles.)

Starring: Avaz Latif, Soran Ebrahim, Hiresh Feysal Rahman.

Director: Bahman Ghobadi.

Running time: 1 hr. 35 min.

Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills; Regal University Town Center 6, Irvine.

In a nutshell: A strikingly realistic film by the director of ``A Time for Drunken Horses.''

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Photo:

Kurdish girl Avaz Latif turns the head of one of the young land-mine salvagers in ``Turtles Can Fly.