The world of Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi lies somewhere between postmodernism and pre-civilization. In his first film, A Time for Drunken Horses, a maimed family — the smuggler dad is missing, the deformed dwarf brother suffers from a fatal disease — try to make ends meet by smuggling goods over the Iraq-Iran border via the title quadrupeds (mules, actually). Ghobadi’s extravagance did not stop with plotting; some of his images were among the most astonishing in recent years. Despite the excesses, the film describes a cogent universe in which feudalism meets the 21st century, to the benefit of neither.

The economics of A Time for Drunken Horses seem positively Keynesian compared with those of Turtles Can Fly. The new film is set in a refugee camp on the Iraqi border with Iran and Turkey a few weeks before the Iraq War, and business there seems to be picking up, if not exactly booming. Armies of small children, many of them missing hands ("they are our best workers," someone says), scour the fields of local farmers for land mines to sell to a UN representative. Organizing this activity is Soran (Soran Ebrahim), a/k/a "Satellite," because his sideline is hooking up local villages with satellite dishes and tuning them into the networks broadcasting the news of the world — i.e., the war. Tooling around the camp’s lunar landscape on a bike bedecked with bells, whistles, and ribbons, rushing from one business crisis to another, the baseball-capped, bespectacled Satellite is a wonderful character, a Kurdish amalgam of Ferris Bueller and William Gaddis’s JR, a metaphor for a brash, new, Yankee-loving entrepreneurial spirit in the tired Middle East.

For even though things are no easier in Turtles than they were in Horses, the atmosphere is much less lugubrious. Satellite and his cohort — urchins like Pashow (Saddam Hossein Feysal), a Dondi-like scamp with a twisted leg — are can-do types, trading radios for a satellite dish, or mines for a machine gun, and in general transforming the piles of ruined armored vehicles and the stacks of discharged artillery shells that surround their camp (the surreal, apocalyptic setting is another reason to see this film) from waste of war into profit and power.

But there are interruptions in the steady growth of Satellite’s American Dream. A family even more traumatized than the one in Horses moves in. Their parents killed by Saddam’s army, Agrin (Avaz Latif, a heartbreaking beauty whose age seems to vary from 11 to 30), her little brother (or is he?) Riga, and her older brother Hengov (Hiresh Feysal Rahman) are a furtive version of the Holy Family, and they catch Satellite’s eye. Especially, at first, Agrin: what chivalrous young idealist wouldn’t fall for that despairing backward glance, almost Pre-Raphaelite in its promise of eternal suffering and beauty? But Hengov proves formidable as well. Missing both arms, he compensates with a vicious head butt and an ability to predict the future.

No big trick, that: the future offers war and, some think, the end of the world. (Given the dire conditions, how could anybody tell the difference?) Everyone is desperate for the latest news, and in hilarious scenes, Satellite sets up TV reception for an audience of village elders who cringe uncomfortably when the "forbidden channels" come on. When Fox News turns up and Satellite translates its fair and balanced commentary as "it will rain tomorrow," it appears the Kurds aren’t any better informed than people in the United States. They do, however, have Hengov, and like most sibyls, his prophecies portend tragedy. This is not the wisest direction for Ghobadi to take, as he can’t seem to resist piling on catastrophe until you have everyone either dead or staring blankly on the roadside sporting new, crippling injuries.

The film seems in a rush to get these poignant moments on screen, blowing past any semblance of nuanced or coherent narrative as it fills the spaces between them. The images range from the bathetic (a pair of slippers on the edge of a cliff) to the surreal (the severed arm of a Saddam statue bought from America troops with some land mines) to the profound (hundreds gathered on a hill as American helicopters drop pamphlets reading "we are the best in the world"). Disjointed, assaultive, made up of scattered shards and obscure allusions, the style, like the setting, is both postmodern and primitive. Maybe this is the way stories will be told in the future, when the world has ended.