The Case

A story of artistic freedom, humor, resilience, and resistance, focused on a five-year legal battle between one individual Turkish cartoonist and the state that seeks to censor her

One day, around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, cartoonist Zehra Ömeroglu submits a new piece for a well-known satirical magazine—risqué, perhaps, but ultimately harmless..A few weeks later, she receives a call from her editor: police officers have arrived at the magazine’s offices, her cartoon has been labelled "obscene," and she’s being taken to court.

So begins a protractedly surreal struggle against Turkish state censorship, bureaucracy, and patriarchal mentality. The trial grows to Kafkaesque proportions, to the point of semantic absurdity, with the question “What is art?” itself subjected to the dark joke of governmental cross-examination. Ömeroglu departs her home nation, but with relocation comes uncertainty, and crossing borders rarely guarantees freedom.

A true story that blends honesty with wit, told in the visual imagery of its own subject, The Case is about more than just one particular trial: it’s about the endurance and resilience of the artistic spirit when threatened by a universal sea of troubles and the law’s delay—and it’s also very funny. After all, when your government clamps down on comedy, sometimes all you can do is laugh.