Turkish film looks at both sides of Gallipoli

The soldiers talked much more about the disease and the conditions than the fighting.

History, they say, is written by the victors. But the story of the Allied campaign to take the Gallipoli peninsula has been handed down through generations in Australia and New Zealand with barely a word about the blokes in the other lot of trenches.

Serious scholars have covered the ground but the national narrative on both sides of the Tasman has made the events of the summer of 1915 into the crucible of our national identity. We tend to pass over the fact that it was a hideously bungled operation. And we tend to forget that there was another side.

Enter Turkish film-maker Tolga Ornek, whose feature-length documentary Gallipoli is a comprehensive and rounded portrait of the campaign as might be imagined. The film, which opens in 18 cinemas nationwide today, eschews the epic view and zooms in close on a handful of individual Turkish and Allied soldiers.

Ornek, an intense but personable 33-year-old, was in Auckland this week, talking about the long process of making the film which was Turkish-financed but benefited from the in-kind support of film and document archives including the Imperial War Museum, the Australian War Memorial and the New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage.

His youthful good looks belie a packed CV which comprises four documentaries since 1998 including one on Kemal Ataturk, the founder and first president of Turkey and another on the ancient Hittite civilisation. Those two large-scale projects served as calling-cards for this one and convinced scholars and archivists to take him seriously.

It was during the making of the Ataturk film that he first travelled to the fabled battlefields where the leader, then known as Mustafa Kemal, was a triumphant and charismatic commander. Researching more deeply, he became intrigued by "common horrific experience" of the Turks and the Allies, he says. Thus, although the film makes use of all the existing footage - including the battlefield sequences shot by Ellis Ashmead Bartlett and Ernest Brooks and restored by Weta Digital - Ornek has extracted something more precious from the archives of four countries: the piercingly poignant stories of soldiers, told through their letters home.

"I knew that I had to cover both sides," he says, "and I knew that I had to individualise the stories. I had to dispense with the military strategies and tactics and follow the individual characters. I wanted an identification between the audience and the characters so that at the end of the film they would have the same apprehension that the families of the soldiers had, so they would say: 'I wonder if that guy survived'."

Thus the characters were chosen according to the amount of documentary evidence that could be assembled about their lives before, during and - if they survived - after the campaign.

The Gallipoli campaign was notable for the shortage of animosity between military enemies. In the name - "Johnny Turk" - that the Anzac troops applied to the other side, there was a trace of a grim admiration that would have been unimaginable in reference to Nazi soldiers. Ornek says one expert told him that neither side did anything that they were ashamed of in later years.

"That's very important, I think, and it's unique to Gallipoli. The friendship that the countries have, that bond, has its roots in that respect between the soldiers. They knew that they had to kill each other but there was no animosity."

Turks commemorate the events of 1915 on March 18, the day of the Allied landings and again on August 10, the day of the final victory at Chunuk Bair but they enthusiastically and solemnly join April 25 commemorations at Anzac Cove. Ornek says Gallipoli stands out in Turkish history even if other campaigns - the war of independence five years later - were more historically significant.

"It's the battle in which Ataturk emerges as a commander. He used the respect and fame he earned there to achieve everything he achieved afterwards. Also the Ottoman empire had been in decline before 1915; for 50 or 60 years the Turks had seen nothing but defeats. Gallipoli established Turkish self-confidence and the foundation of the republic had its roots there."

The film brings home with often gut-wrenching force the appalling conditions endured by the soldiers in the trenches on both sides.

Ornek explains that after the beginning of May, far more men died from typhoid and dysentery than from bullets and shrapnel.

"In their diaries and the letters during the summer, the soldiers talked much more about the disease and the conditions than the fighting. I really wanted to be as confrontational as possible about that, to make people feel how I felt as I read the diaries."

What: Gallipoli
Where and when: Screening at Berkeley, Mission Bay from Thursday