Gallipoli

Herald rating: * * * *

This extraordinary documentary was completed in time to screen at the 90th Anniversary celebrations in Turkey, Australia and New Zealand of the iconic and famously bungled campaign to take the peninsula that guarded the approaches to Istanbul.

It is, of course, far from an untold story. Dozens of documentaries of varying scope and quality have explored the events of the winter of 1915 which loom large in the national mythmaking of Australia and New Zealand.

What distinguishes this film, which is produced, directed and financed by Turkish interests (though it's in English), is that it narrates simultaneously the experiences of both sides in the conflict.

By dint of extensive and intensive research in archives in Turkey, Britain, Australia and here, the film-makers have assembled the stories of a handful of individual soldiers. These unfold gradually and movingly in excerpts from their letters, read by Jeremy Irons and Sam Neill.

The triangulated view gives a three-dimensional portrait and as a result is as complete a record as might be imagined.I certainly did not know, for example, that of the 120,000 deaths during the campaign, 20,000 were Turks who succumbed to disease.

In style, it is mainly still photographs and talking heads - though all, including Kiwi military historian Chris Pugsley, are passionate and impressive.

But director Ornek has also obtained every scrap of moving footage, including the battlefield sequences restored by Weta, and the sparingly used live-action inserts are potent and evocative.

It has to be said that, for a nation that has grown up on the Gallipoli legend, we have been spared many of the grisly details.

Only those who have gone looking between hard covers will know the appalling privations endured by those in the trenches, but Ornek leaves little out.

Coolly, respectfully and unsensationally the film explains what happens when explosive shells land in trenches, or how trench latrines work when everyone has dysentery.

If that makes the film sound hard to take, it shouldn't. Gallipoli is a noble, serious and comprehensive piece of work which deserves to stand for the next century as the definitive film record of what one soldier called "an absent-minded war".

DIRECTOR: Tolga Ornek
RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes
RATING: PG
SCREENING: Berkeley, Mission Bay from Thursday