Film · 2004 · Films · 2000s
Turtles Can Fly
Scored from 70 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
On the Iraqi-Turkish border in the weeks before the 2003 American invasion, a Kurdish refugee camp of tents and wrecked tanks depends on a thirteen-year-old the others call Satellite, who rigs aerials so the elders can watch the news and organises the children into crews that dig up landmines to sell. His standing is unsettled by three newcomers: the withdrawn Agrin, her armless brother Hengov, who is said to see the future, and the blind toddler in their care. Satellite courts Agrin, while Hengov's warnings and his sister's silence point back to what their family suffered under Saddam's forces. Bahman Ghobadi's Kurdish-language drama was shot in northern Iraq with a cast of local children.
Turtles Can Fly is a 2004 drama and war film. It runs 1h 38m. It plays in Kurdish. Its country of origin is listed as Iran.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,846 2000s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 577 of whom clear the calibration test. Only 70 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 77 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Turtles Can Fly lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2000s (7,847 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 70.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
