Remember the name Bahman Ghobadi, whose “children's film” Turtles Can Fly (2004) I have finally had the opportunity to see. As I watched this picture, I thought of two of its cinematic relatives, each of which shall frame my discussion of Turtles Can Fly. The first is Roberto Rossellini's neorealist film Germany, Year Zero (1947), in which a twelve-year-old boy, trying to feed his family amidst the destitution of occupied Berlin, poisons his sickly father (played by the only professional in the cast, Franz Kruger) to lessen the burden. Unable to live with the deed, however, he throws himself from the ruins of a tall building – but not before poignantly finding a moment to play (yes, play, not pray) before killing himself.

The second work I recalled, as I screened Turtles Can Fly, is the “new” neorealist West Beirut (1998), a film by Ziad Doueiri about two Muslim boys and a Christian girl (all played by young people who had never before acted) growing up in the war-torn Lebanon of 1975. Here they manage to tease, quarrel, idle, snack, and bicycle like their youthful counterparts everywhere, at the same time as they take risks – amidst bombed-out buildings, rubble-strewn streets, military checkpoints, and frequent sniper fire – that even the most intrepid of schoolchildren would have trouble imagining.