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Turtles in Movies   The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is an Iranian movie made by the great director Abbas Kiarostami. It's slow with little action, so the viewer needs to follow the advice of the title. An intense documentary filmmaker we know only as the "Engineer" (Behzad Dorani) travels to a small rural village somewhere in Iran, far from his big city home, to film a funeral ceremony. When he arrives he learns that the dying woman is still hanging on to life, which forces him to wait and wait. He tries to connect with the villagers, but conflicts with their slower paced simpler lives. (Along with the viewer, he also needs to learn to relax and "go with the flow.") There is no cell phone reception in the village so the Engineer needs to drive from the village up to a cemetery on a nearby hilltop to use his phone. It's probably the cemetery where the old woman will be buried. We see him drive up the hill again and again. On one of his visits he becomes frustrated when talking on the phone to his boss, who has become impatient that he has been in the village for more than 2 weeks. He sees a tortoise crawling over a large cement grave marker and kicks it to turn it over on to its back. It rolls back onto its feet, so he kicks it again and leaves it. After he drives away we see the tortoise struggle and eventually right itself and crawl away. This sounds trivial, but it's an act of emotion and violence that is shocking to the viewer, who has watched the film for over an hour with nothing even remotely this dramatic happening. (If this were a version of Aesop's fable, the Engineer would be the hare who is defeated by the slow and steady tortoise.) Some viewers would say nothing ever happens in this very slowly paced film, but Iranian films of this era tend to be very subtle due to their low budgets and the heavy censorship of films by the Iranian government. I don't know what species of tortoise is used here. There are two tortoises native to Iran - Horsfield's Tortoise - Testudo horsfieldii, and Spur-thighed Tortoise - Tesdudo graeca, so it's probably one of these.