Beyond a war and a wall

They are young victims of guerrillas, dictators, chemical weapons, landmines and machetes. Other teens contend with threats less salient but sometimes just as fatal: alcohol, drugs and boredom. Some are rich, most are not. But they were all part of a disturbing collage of global adolescent voices represented recently at the 55th Annual Berlin Film Festival.

The films in the 14 Plus program were engrained with a gritty realism that three servings of “American Pie” and other teen films eschew. With less sunshine than a Berlin winter, the 14 Plus segment with its lineup of nine international films portends a depressing world order -- the bleak stories behind the “have-nots” and the “have-too-muches” in the kingdom of wrinkle-free faces.

In the first category was “Turtles Can Fly,” an Iranian-Iraqi film that just opened in the U.S. and plumbs the noble suffering of young Kurdish refugees caught between Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror and the American occupation. Another film that puts partial blame on U.S. meddling is “Innocent Voices,” a harrowing tale of an 11-year-old Salvadoran boy’s odyssey during his country’s civil war in the ‘80s. Rounding out the genre is the story of “Saimir,” an Albanian refugee who wrestles with his conscience when his father enlists him in smuggling girls into prostitution.

The offerings pegged in the overindulgent slot -- a scene more familiar to American audiences -- include the Swedish date-rape debacle called “Fourteen Sucks,” which follows the present generation of slacker Swedes trapped between partying and more partying, this time with disastrous results. And then there is “My Summer of Love” from Great Britain, in which one young waif fights hypocrisy and abuse all under the influence of a married man, a born-again brother, a false friend and psylocibin mushrooms.

There are no children here.

Said director Bahman Ghobadi of his “Turtles Can Fly”: “Even though it is a movie for children, about children, these are not children -- there are no children where I come from, there is no childhood. At age 15, I had to be a father because I lost my father. I emptied myself and my frustrations in the film.”

Ghobadi searched for his actors in Kurdistan, where he found more than enough young orphans without arms or legs to play the parts. The main character is Satellite -- called so because he jury-rigs satellite dishes so the elders know when the war starts. Talented Soran Ebrahim plays the skinny 13-year-old boy oozing charm and fortitude who takes charge of the kids in the village, a tent city of rust and mud sunk inside the gray lunarscape called northern Iraq. While Ghobadi’s movie garnered special mention in Berlin, the Crystal Bear went to “Innocent Voices,” a much slicker production based on the tragic story of Oscar Torres and directed by Luis Mandoki, best known in the U.S. for his “Message in a Bottle.” In this Spanish-language offering, Mandoki unleashes his message between raindrops when he sustains a close-up of an American Army officer who watches as Salvadoran soldiers march young boys off through the jungle to war. The film features yet another troubled boy struggling to grow up between rounds of mayhem, this time traded by the Salvadoran government and guerrilla fighters.

In “Saimir,” Francesco Munzi’s thoughtful first feature, Italy with its Albanian mafia, people smuggling and human trafficking never looked worse. Here again a young boy saves the day, like some post-apocalyptic superhero, forced to right the wrongs in a world he inherited from the mean (the Albanian mafia) and the weak (his father).

Adults are not so much weak in “Fourteen Sucks” as they are absent, busy, depressed or just too busy to notice their kids’ hangovers. The teenagers in this world apparently don’t do school, church or sports. In the land of the midnight sun, summer by a clear Scandinavian lake is where the young are blond cherubs with toothy smiles, golden abs and nothing better to do than drink Absolut until they puke on their clothes, pick fights, smash public property, pass out in bathtubs and worse.

As seen through the filmmakers’ prism, this year’s 14 Plus films speak of the challenges along the road to adulthood. One of four directors -- three guys and a girl -- from Sweden is Martin Jern, a headbanded 25-year-old who also wrote the script. He blamed hypersexualization in the media and poor parenting for today’s youth culture, a milieu he sounds happy to have survived. “Kids are bored,” Jern said. “They have too much freedom, too much stress, too much drinking and they have to be good-looking. Teenagers are young and really old at the same time.”