“The pinnacle of impudence. » Sometimes a few words are enough to capture the spirit of the times. The latter were written by the director and actor Mahir Günsiray, known for his independence of mind and his finesse of acting. Son of a star father of Turkish cinema, himself exposed to the vicissitudes of public theater and to censorship for ages, he wanted with a simple tweet to express all the anger and nausea that surrounded the release of the first episode of a series entitled Metamorfoz produced and broadcast by the state channel TRT.
Accessible free of charge on the public service’s new online platform, the series is supposed to narrate the adventures of a young idealist and anti-racist activist who became a capitalist and a conspirator after inheriting his father’s fortune. The hero of the plot is called Teoman Bayramli. But no one in Turkey was fooled: the physique of the main actor, his thick hair, his beard and his blue eyes merge to be mistaken with those of the patron and businessman Osman Kavala, imprisoned since 2017 The artifice is a crude staging to present him as guilty of the misdemeanors and crimes of which the power of Ankara accuses him.
In real life, the philanthropist was sentenced in 2022, after four and a half years in pre-trial detention, to life without the possibility of remission. A drastic verdict delivered after less than an hour of deliberation and in which seven other defendants, architect Mücella Yapici, documentary filmmaker Çigdem Mater, civil rights activist Ali Hakan Altinay, lawyer Can Atalay, director Mine Özerden, academic Tayfun Kahraman and the founder of numerous NGOs Yigit Ali Ekmekçi were sentenced to eighteen years in prison each. All guilty of trying to “overthrow the government” having fomented the demonstrations in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in the spring of 2013.
Punish the patron
The movement was the first major protest against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then Prime Minister. Peaceful and spontaneous, carried above all by the youth, it ended in violent repression, at the cost of eight deaths. At the time, Osman Kavala, known for devoting his fortune to his charitable activities and the enhancement of Turkey’s multicultural heritage – Kurdish, Armenian and Syriac – tried to mediate between the demonstrators and the authorities. . It took him badly. He has since become the main target of the authorities. The Turkish number one will never make a secret of his desire to punish the patron.
