Istanbul
A Turkish movie that broke box-office records this week depicts American soldiers as brutal psychopaths. In Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, Turkish agents go to Iraq in response to a real event—the 2003 detention by U.S. soldiers of Turkish special-forces operatives who were fighting the Kurds. But the rest is fiction. Mohawk-sporting, Bible-thumping U.S. soldiers gleefully shoot Iraqi children point-blank, and a U.S. army surgeon harvests organs from dead Iraqis and ships them to Israel. With a budget of $10 million, the film is Turkey’s most expensive ever, and after just one week in theaters it is already the most successful. In Istanbul, the film debuted in 63 of the city’s 72 cinemas.
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