Fatin Kanat

At Turkey’s oldest zoo, a lonely manager and a neglected female officer form an unlikely bond: as they hide the death of the zoo’s oldest inhabitant, an Anatolian leopard, in order to stop the privatization process and fake its escape, they set in motion an absurd charade that spins out of control. In Turkey’s grey and quiet capital, the ghost of the leopard persists.

The film tells the life and struggle of Doctor İsmail Beşikçi, who graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences, Department of Administrative Sciences and completed his PhD in sociology at Erzurum University. He reached the conclusion “Kurds exist, there is a Kurdish problem” during his field work and spent 17 years of his life in prison at different periods because he opposed official theses based on denial.