Good movie, very shaky on its historicity

Rating: 2/10 (28 May 2015)

This is a good movie to watch. The direction is good, especially in the battle scenes and the acting is very emotional and spot on. The plot, though predictable, flows in a nice pace. The music is also very well-chosen. The ending is a little weird perhaps, but it's not completely out of place, albeit when someone tries to kill Russel Crowe and someone else.
However, I am dismayed by two things regarding the historicity of the film. Firstly, at the beginning it says "Based on historical events". That should read "loosely based" because after a while of searching I found zero evidence that the story in the film actually happened, besides an anecdotal story about an Australian father who went to Gallipoli to search for his son, found in an officer's letter. Everything else is up to the film-maker's imagination. Putting the film in a historical period does not mean the film is based on historical events. This is the minor of the two points though.
The more important gripe with historicity, that I have, is the background story that is going on. The Greco-Turkish War was a continuation of the conflicts that Greeks and Turks had during the late years of WW1. The film portrays the Turks as the innocent victims and the Greeks as the invading barbarians who came to slaughter everyone. The Greeks did indeed commit atrocities during that war, and their own government admits it, but the atrocities were hardly contained on one side. In fact, the atrocities first began by the Turks, who carried out the Armenian genocide a few years earlier (and the film was released on the centennial of the Armenian Genocide), and then moved on to other Christian denominations, primarily the Greeks (who were consisting a very large portion of Turkey's population on the west coasts, where the film takes place). Which in contrast to the Greek government, the Turkish government completely denies, despite numerous condemnations from other nations about this. That camp they mention in Afyon, was a concentration camp used for mass murder, from which several ANZAC survivors say they only survived because of the local Greeks who were with them in the camp who helped them survive.
I liked the movie, but these issues annoyed me so much, that I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd like to in the end.