Searching for the feel-good movie of the summer? Keep looking.

		'Turtles Can Fly' Rating: Not rated but contains some disturbing and violent imagery. In Kurdish with subtitles. Starring: Soran Ebrahim. Director: Bahman Ghobadi.

Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi's disturbing drama "Turtles Can Fly," opening Friday at Regent Square Theater, is set in a refugee camp in Kurdish Iraq. A large gang of children without parents, many without arms or legs, fill a vital role in the local used-arms procurement industry by disarming land mines and selling the parts to vendors.

Not depressing enough? An outspoken and intelligent 13-year-old boy, who acts as de facto caretaker for the younger members of the gang, is maimed while bravely trying to save an infant stranded in a minefield.

Still unmoved? The toddler was intentionally put there by his 9-year-old primary caregiver, who's tired of baby-sitting.

To the masses of parentless Kurdish children who, in their young lives, have already witnessed much suffering and death, human life has little value. To the few adults who live near the camp, the children are an expendable commodity. Vendors who wrangle enough kids to bring back a quantity of disarmed bomb parts can afford a TV satellite dish.

Before liberals start whining about "Bush's war," they should know that Ghobadi's movie is set during the days before the American invasion, and everyone -- kids, adults, politicians -- cheers the impending fall of Saddam and welcomes the American liberators. And before conservatives start clucking about "liberal media," they should understand that Ghobadi could have turned "Turtles Can Fly" into a political statement, but he didn't. Instead, he tells a gripping if upsetting story against the backdrop of a barely functioning society caught between Western headlines and the rapidly changing politics of the Middle East.

Some of Ghobadi's photography is beautiful, until you realize the pathetic lifestyles of the people he's depicting, the same northern Iraqi Kurds he chronicled in 2000's "A Time for Drunken Horses." His amateur cast includes many children whose war wounds are painfully evident. Soran Ebrahim is a natural as Satellite, the bright young entrepreneur who looks after the orphaned refugees. Hiresh Feysal Rahman gives a quiet but distant dignity to the prophetic Boy with No Arms, and Avaz Latif as his sister carries the deep and tragic secrets at the core of movie's cold, black heart.