Valley of the Wolves - Iraq
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Valley of the Wolves - Iraq |
| Original title | Kurtlar Vadisi - Iraq |
| Country of production | Turkey |
| original language | Turkish |
| Publishing year | 2006 |
| length | 143 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 18 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Serdar Akar |
| script |
Raci Şaşmaz Bahadır Özdener |
| production | Raci Şaşmaz |
| music | Gökhan Kırdar |
| camera | Selahattin Sancaklı |
| cut | Kemalettin Osmanlı |
| occupation | |
| |
Valley of the Wolves - Irak (Original title: Kurtlar Vadisi - Irak ) is a controversially discussed feature film ( action genre ) by the Turkish director Serdar Akar from 2006. The plot is based on the successful television series Valley of the Wolves . There the film hero, Polat Alemdar , fights against the mafia as a secret agent of the fictional Turkish secret service KGT . In the movie, he travels to Iraq to avenge the sack affair on the US troops, which Turkey experienced as a humiliation . The film was followed by three sequels, most recently Valley of the Wolves - Fatherland in 2017.
With production costs of around eight million euros, the film was the most expensive Turkish film production until then. With over three million viewers so far (as of February 2006) it is also one of the most successful.
action
The film begins with the suicide of one of those Turkish officers after the sack affair . In his suicide note, he calls for revenge for this disgrace after a telephone request from the officers' commander to be allowed to seek hero's death in a gun battle against their American offenders on the spot was rejected by a senior commander. Because the Americans declared the Turkish soldiers to be terrorists, the soldiers were all put sacks over their heads in order to expose them in public.
In the next shot, the special team around the protagonist of the film Polat Alemdar is already on the way to Arbil . Right at the start, three Kurdish soldiers are killed at a road block. Then the team installs explosives in the H (ar) ilton hotel and thus forces the appearance of the US secret service agent Sam William Marshall, who is responsible for the sack affair and other atrocities in the film . Due to his unscrupulousness, however, the latter can once again escape his fate, as Polat Alemdar refrains from blowing up the building in the face of children being kidnapped into the hotel.
The group later prepares a wing of Saddam Hussein , which is to be given to Sam William Marshall, with explosives. However, he escaped his death by accident. After numerous tests, Polat Alemdar finally succeeds in killing Sam William Marshall with a stab in the heart.
In one of the subplots, US soldiers storm a wedding under flimsy pretexts, murder the groom, some guests and little Ali and kidnap and abuse the rest of the wedding party as alleged terrorists. The bride Leyla has been seeking revenge since then and becomes the lifesaver of Polat Alemdar and his companions. However, she fails to take the vengeance herself, and instead of her, Polat thrusts the dagger that was once given to Leyla at the wedding into Sam's heart.
The fate of the wedding party exemplifies the horrors of the US occupation. The surviving wedding guests are transported in a locked container after their arrest. When he was made aware of the danger of suffocation, agent Dante shoots holes in the container wall and the people trapped at random. The transport arrives at Abu-Ghuraib prison . Only a few of those transported are still standing, many are already dead. The following scene recreates the abuse by Lynndie England and her colleagues. Prisoners are stripped and stacked naked or tortured with ice-cold jets of water.
In prison, a Jewish doctor removes kidneys and other organs from prisoners to be sent to Tel-Aviv, London and New York. Already in H (ar) Ilton deluxe hotel by one had sidelocks and black caftan recognizable Jew left the scene after the appearance of the hero. Sam William Marshall has a Christian communion picture on the wall and, while adoring his crucifix , vows to deliver Babylon from the infidels, the Muslims.
The Muslim counter-figure to the US occupiers is the Qadiri Sheikh Abdurrahman Halis Kerküki. After the loss of her husband, he prevents the Leyla he raised from becoming a suicide bomber , as this is a twofold sin against Islam. He later prevents a kidnapped journalist from being beheaded by young al-Qaida supporters. The morally superior Islam he embodies is portrayed as the unifying force for the ethnic groups incited against one another by the US troops and as the real opponent of the occupiers.
Historical background
- Main article: Sack affair
The film is based on a historical event, the so-called sack affair . On July 4, 2003, a few weeks after the official end of the Iraq war , 11 Turkish officers and intelligence officers and 13 civilians were captured in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyya . There would have been indications that they were preparing an attack on the Iraqi Kurdish governor of Kirkuk province . These officers were taken away by US soldiers with sacks over their heads and detained for 60 hours. The affair sparked public outrage in Turkey. Neither the US nor Turkey publicly apologized to the other side, but both expressed their regret over the incident.
criticism
Kurtlar Vadisi - Iraq mixes events of the US occupation in Iraq with events from Afghanistan and various, also anti-Semitic clichés about the universal horror of the US occupation. For the first time in film history , a feature film takes up the torture scenes in Abu-Ghuraib prison . Otherwise, the film also makes use of actual events, such as the massacre at a wedding party in the village of Maqarr adh-Dhib , the incitement of ethnic groups against each other and the arrest of Turkish soldiers and secret service agents stylized as a myth in the film .
Even the depiction of the prisoner transport, in which a container in which prisoners are threatened to suffocate, is shot “to create holes for the air”, is based on reports of the massacre of the Taliban prisoners of war in November 2001. In the documentary Das Massaker von Mazar of Jamie Doran confirm Afghan soldiers transporting detainees in containers and their fire, "in order to provide ventilation." US soldiers were also present when prisoners were mutilated and executed.
A Jewish doctor is shown in prison in Abu-Ghuraib removing organs from living and dying prisoners and sending them to Tel Aviv, London and New York.
The depiction of the mercenaries working on behalf of the US government can also be seen as clichéd, reminiscent of the controversial fighters from companies like Academi (then Blackwater) , which in the film consist of muscle-bound Rambo- like characters. In the film they form the bodyguard of the villain, who is also a civilian himself, and his relationship of trust with them is portrayed more intimately than with the soldiers. The scene in which holes are being shot in the container with the prisoners is followed by a dispute between a regular soldier and the mercenary who is the perpetrator. The soldier reprimands the mercenary for his act, whereupon he shoots the soldier. Further clichés are the Kurdish collaborators , who are always unshaven and never taken seriously by the film heroes .
As is customary in the genre, the world is divided into good and bad, with the occupation of the bad guys with US troops breaking Hollywood-style viewing habits and serving rather anti-American , anti-Christian and anti-Semitic clichés instead of the usual orientalist-racist and anti-communist ones .
The film consistently legitimizes the entanglements of secret services, military, mafia, nationalist and religious organizations, which are known in Turkey as derin devlet ( deep state ). An example of this is the nationalist agent Polat Alemdar, who infiltrated the Mafia in the series, is now avenging the shame of the army in Iraq. He always met Islam, embodied by Qadiri-Sheikh Kerküki, with full respect and helped its struggle to victory on the secular level.
There is an equivalent in reality for this division of labor. The uncle of the three brothers involved in the film, Necati (leading actor), Raci (screenwriter) and Zübeyr Şaşmaz, was a member of the right-wing extremist Turkish nationalist party MHP , while his father and grandfather was Sheikh of Qadiriyya . There are other connections to MHP, BBP and Qadiriyya in the immediate vicinity .
Reactions in Turkey
The film is extremely successful in Turkey. He has been repeatedly praised by politicians in the AKP government. The film will also be set off against the turkophoben US film from 1978 Midnight Express by Alan Parker , who portrays the anguish of a young US citizen who falls for a drug offense in a Turkish prison.
The Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbaş turned itself into the controversy and said enthusiastically: "The film is very successful" and "The honor of a soldier must never attack." Industry Minister Ali Coskun predicted the film will go down in Turkish cinema history; he added: "May Allah protect the Turks." Parliamentary President Bülent Arinc asked the director whether the script was true. "One to one," replied the. Arinc praised it as an excellent film "that will make history". The wife of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan , Emine, took a seat next to the main actor at the performance and enthusiastically congratulated him: It was “really very nice”.
The newspaper Vatan (Fatherland) wrote: “Whoever sees this film loves his fatherland even more than before.” On the other hand, opponents of nationalist-Islamist unification efforts strongly opposed the film, according to Haluk Şahin in Radikal . The film also received bad reviews from other high-circulation newspapers. The newspaper Milliyet accuses the film of forcing the viewer “with didactic and pompous dialogues and unfounded scenarios”. Anti-Americanism in particular is criticized in Turkey, while anti-Semitism, which is much discussed in Germany, hardly plays a role.
Reactions in Germany
After the debate had begun on the feature pages, quoted on 19 February 2006, the Bild am Sonntag the CSU chairpersons Edmund Stoiber :
"I urge the cinema operators to stop this racist and anti-Western hate film immediately."
When asked whether he had already seen the film, he replied with a "No!"
The distributor of the film Şahin replied that the removal demanded by Stoiber was playing into the hands of right-wing extremists:
“If a cartoonist insults two billion Muslims, it means freedom of expression for the West. But when an action film takes an American on the grain, is of sedition spoken. "
Cem Özdemir , MEP for the Greens , expressed a similar line of thought with the opposite conclusion :
"Anyone who thinks this film is good should be silent about the published Mohammed cartoons ."
Claudia Roth viewed the film to examine Edmund Stoiber's allegations and came to the conclusion:
"I thought the film was really bad, but hate speech is not."
Bülent Arslan, the chairman of the German-Turkish forum of the CDU, defended the film from calls for a ban and pointed out that American film productions work with similar enemy images .
In the young world , the film was controversial. While Nick Brauns criticized the film as a woodcut-like front position in the Kulturkampf, Jürgen Elsässer did not see the generally expressed criticisms confirmed. For him, the film is "entirely according to the Hollywood recipe - just the other way around politically" and he therefore sees it as a "means against the clash of cultures". Werner Pirker also ironically attributed the allegations in the young world to the film's "apparently high level of reality".
The Turkish community in Berlin turned against the ban demands with the words:
"It [the film] is exactly the culture that the West has been preaching to us for 50 years."
The writer Feridun Zaimoglu described the excitement as "hypocrisy". For him, "it is simply one of the usual" I-knock-him-the-turnip-films ", a" typical Rambo film "." “Hollywood has been following the friend-foe scheme for decades, the enemies are the Viet Cong, then the bad, bad Bolsheviks. Nobody asked: What is the American looking for in Vietnam or in other countries? You could appreciate these Rambo films. "
The Cinemaxx cinemas removed the film from their program on February 21, 2006. The press spokesman stressed, however, that this should not be understood as a reaction to political demands.
The film reached the top 5 of the German cinema charts.
Reactions in German-speaking countries
In other countries, including Switzerland, the film was shown in cinemas without any noteworthy criticism from politics or society. The Swiss film portal cinema.ch rated the debate as "almost a bit of a cartoon dispute with the opposite sign".
Age rating
The film initially started in German cinemas on February 9, 2006 without the FSK label, as the test procedure had not yet been completed at that time. After an objection from the Turkish film distributor, the release was set to FSK 16. On February 19, 2006, the North Rhine-Westphalian Minister for Generations, Family, Women and Integration Armin Laschet ( CDU ) demanded that the film should only be released from the age of 18. According to FAZ he called the film "socially disorienting".
On March 10, 2006, the appeal committee, the highest authority of the voluntary self-regulation of the film industry, again discussed the age rating of the film. The committee came to the conclusion that the film should be labeled “ No youth approval”.
In Switzerland, the film is released from the age of 16.
Movie reviews
“Director Serdar Akar presents an elaborately staged and technically perfect action film for which he was able to engage two veteran Hollywood actors, Billy Zane and Gary Busey. Akar orientated himself here on the so-called 'sack affair' that actually took place, which in 2003 led to serious resentment among the allies. But the director also shows the devastation in a country torn by war and therefore had to put up with the accusation that he paints a too one-sided, too negative image of the Americans. Gary Busey, for example, is an American of Jewish descent who takes advantage of the desolate situation in Iraq to swear off the organs of the tortured Muslim population in exchange for plenty of coal, in order to then sell them to the USA at a fantastic profit. Fiction that can have something to do with reality, but doesn't have to! "
“The extremely violent and at the same time very talkative action film is only superficially politicized; Rather, it is a story of revenge in terms of 'honor' and at the same time a sentimental melodrama with a purely political connection to reality, where sometimes the Christian mission, but the next moment about the northern Iraqi oil deposits. In addition, the film picks up on current images and recreates the well-known photos from the Abu Ghraib torture prison as well as relevant execution videos. What is noticeable here is that, with one exception, it is all about arguments between men. "
success
The film was very successful in both Turkey and Germany. On the first weekend in Turkey 1.1 million people are said to have seen the film. In Germany, over 260,000 people saw the film. In Austria, 26,000 visitors were registered for the film on the first weekend.
DVD
On January 26, 2007, the film was released under the title Valley of the Wolves in a double DVD edition by Koch Media in the synchronous languages German, English and Kurdish.
Web links
- Valley of the Wolves - Iraq in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Dialogue of Cultures ( Jungle World, February 22, 2006)
- Iraq War, Turkish Nationalism and Freedom of Expression (World Socialist Web Site March 1, 2006)
- The bad guys are always the Americans . In: Welt Online , February 19, 2006
- Perfidious entertainment: What happens in the "Valley of the Wolves" . FAZ.net, February 16, 2006
- From a society that set out to learn how to shudder . Telepolis , February 28, 2006
- We against them , The joy of the dwarfs , The new Ottomans . In: Die Zeit , No. 9/2006.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Certificate of Release for Valley of the Wolves - Iraq . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , March 2006 (PDF; test number: 105 124-a K).
- ^ Regret over Turkish troops' arrest . news.bbc, July 15, 2003.
- ↑ Wedding party massacre . In: The Guardian , May 20, 2004.
- ↑ a b c We found our Rambo . In: sueddeutsche.de , January 17, 2006.
- ↑ a b "Valley of the Wolves": Clear fronts ensure cash . In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger , January 18, 2006.
- ↑ a b c Turned off . In: Tagesspiegel , January 20, 2006.
- ↑ a b Koch-Mehrin defends the film “Valley of the Wolves” . ( Memento of May 30, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Netzeitung , January 21, 2006.
- ↑ Sheep in wolf's clothing? ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Turkish Daily News, February 23, 2006. (Eng.)
- ↑ The new Ottomans . In: Die Zeit , No. 9/2006.
- ↑ Milliyetçiliğin mutasyonu . ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Radikal , February 10, 2006. (Turkish)
- ↑ Lender of "Valley of the Wolves" attacks Stoiber . dradio.de, February 21, 2006.
- ↑ Claudia Roth in the Valley of the Wolves . In: Spiegel Online , February 28, 2008
- ↑ cl-netz.de ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ film-zeit.de ( Memento of the original from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The Limits of Art and Freedom of Expression . FAZ.net, February 21, 2006.
- ^ "Valley of the Wolves": Anti-Israeli and nationalist. In: DiePresse.com. January 27, 2011, accessed January 14, 2018 .
- ↑ Cinemaxx is removing "Valley of the Wolves" from its program . In: Spiegel Online , February 21, 2006.
- ↑ With everything and (in) sharp . Cineman
- ↑ Valley of the Wolves . prisma.de
