(Oneida, NY – Jan. 2015) As part of its series on World War I in film, Oneida Public Library will show on its wide screen Thursday Feb. 7 at 7 p.m. the 1981 Australian film “Gallipoli,” directed by Peter Weir and featuring Mel Gibson and Mark Lee.
The film follows the fate of two young Australian sprinters, played by Gibson and Lee, as they leave the Australian Outback to enlist in 1915 in the Australian Imperial Expeditionary Force soon en route to the Mediterranean. The film follows them to Gallipoli, the peninsula in European Turkey that separates the Aegean Sea from the Dardenelles, where in April 1915 the British navy landed troops in hopes of toppling the Ottoman Empire, a German ally.
The film chronicles how Turkish forces tied down the British forces along the sea, with both sides in trenches attempting to outgun each other. The eight-month battle of Gallipoli is considered by many historians the worst disaster in 20th-century British military history.
The Gallipoli campaign, however, was the first military engagement for Australian and New Zealand troops in the Great War, and it marked for both the soldiers and their families at home a realization that Australia and New Zealand were not merely colonies of Britain but independent “commonwealths” in their own right. The film “Gallipoli,’ written and directed by the Australian Peter Weir, reflects that nationalism as well as its flip side, anti-British bias.
The film showing is free and open to the public. A discussion with refreshments will follow the film. For more information, stop by the Oneida Library, 220 Broad St., or call 315-363-3050.