A little blurb in the Times on Saturday caught my attention: "Turkish Film Pulled From German Screens." Being a proponent of freedom of artistic expression, no matter how controversial (after all, good art should make us think), I immediately jumped on the snippet and looked for further information.
The uproar is over a film called "Valley of the Wolves - Iraq," that German politicians (and they're not alone) have condemned as anti-American and anti-Semitic. Bowing to the pressure, CinemaxX, Germany's largest theater chain, has pulled the movie from their theaters. Cowards.
The starting point of the film is based on a true story, described in this forum, "On July 4, 2003, in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, troops from the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade raided and ransacked a Turkish special forces office, threw hoods over the heads of 11 Turkish special forces officers and held them in custody for more than two days." Apparently, the army did this "unwittingly". At any rate, mistake or not, the Turks were displeased. Then fact turned to fiction and a movie was made: "In the movie, one of the Turkish special forces officers commits suicide to save his honor. His farewell letter reaches Polat Alemdar, an elite Turkish intelligence officer who travels to northern Iraq with a small group of men to avenge the humiliation."
What follows is apparently a very loaded film full of stereotypes and, no, the Americans do not come off looking good. But I wonder if the outrage at the film is a little hypocritical? After all, Hollywood consistently shows Arabs as terrorists and the Japanese as cold-hearted machines and South Americans (regardless of country) as drug lords. So, now that the tables are turned, isn't it a little childish to be upset about it?
Admittedly, I haven't seen the film, so I don't know how offensive it really is, but if this review on Variety.com's Gary Hendrix's blog is anything to go by, it sounds kind of laughable.
I don't condone any form of hateful propaganda, regardless of who created it, but perhaps censorship is not the answer. Dialogue might be a better way to go. After all, the discontent must be rooted in some truth and facing it is probably better for everyone concerned.
