''25 April'' is a 2015 New Zealand animated

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...

about the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign directed by

Leanne Pooley Leanne Pooley ONZM is a Canadian filmmaker based in Auckland, New Zealand. Pooley was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, she immigrated to New Zealand in the mid-1980s and began working in the New Zealand television and film industry ...

. It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section of the

2015 Toronto International Film Festival The 40th annual Toronto International Film Festival was held from 10 to 20 September 2015. On 28 July 2015 the first wave of films to be screened at the Festival was announced. Jean-Marc Vallée's ''Demolition'' starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Naom ...

Reception

The film received mostly positive reviews. In New Zealand, Newshub's Tony Wright gave it four-and-a-half stars and described it as "startlingly original", praising the use of animation to depict the "depravity" of war. The ''New Zealand Herald'''s Peter Calder similarly called it "evocative and moving", adding that the recreation of first-hand accounts of soldiers and a nurse "knit together to provide a comprehensive account of the doomed eight-month campaign to take the peninsula whose name resounds through our national myth." Graeme Tuckett, of Stuff.co.nz, gave ''25 April'' a negative review with two-and-a-half stars. He wrote that it lacked "any sort of context or overview", failed to focus on any Ottoman soldiers and was "unoriginal". He compared it unfavorably with Tolga Ornek's ''

Gallipoli The Gallipoli peninsula (; tr, Gelibolu Yarımadası; grc, Χερσόνησος της Καλλίπολης, ) is located in the southern part of East Thrace, the European part of Turkey, with the Aegean Sea to the west and the Dardanelles ...

'' (2005)''.'' Tom Peters and Sam Price of the

World Socialist Web Site The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) is the website of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It describes itself as an "online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement". The WSWS publishes articles and analys ...

wrote that the documentary had some "moving portrayals" but criticized it for not opposing the First World War itself, instead taking a "national-isolationist" position. They also noted the film-makers' "almost exclusive focus on what the New Zealand and Australian forces endured" and failure to "convey the enormity of the Ottoman Empire's casualties."

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:25 April 2015 films 2015 documentary films New Zealand animated films New Zealand documentary films Documentary films about World War I Films about the Gallipoli campaign Animated documentary films 2010s English-language films