IP is a joke.

At least it was in the seventies. Back then, if you wanted to steal a story, you didn’t need a VPN or a pirate bay. You just needed a projector, a notebook, and a complete lack of shame. This is how we ended up with the weirdest cross-cultural artifact in cinema history: a Turkish version of the 1973 Amitabh Bachchan classic Zanjeer.

We like to think globalization started with the iPhone. It didn’t. It started with grainy 35mm reels being smuggled across borders by men who smelled like cheap tobacco. While the rest of the world was busy trying to figure out if disco was a threat to national security, Turkey’s film industry—Yeşilçam—was busy cannibalizing every hit that came out of Hollywood and Bombay.

Enter Kelepçe. That’s the Turkish title. It means "Handcuffs."

It’s 1982. The Turkish film industry is starving for content but broke as a joke. They see Zanjeer, the movie that turned a lanky, baritone-voiced Amitabh Bachchan into the "Angry Young Man." It’s a story about a cop with a trauma-induced nightmare about a horse. It’s gritty. It’s violent. It’s perfect for a Turkish audience that, at the time, was dealing with its own internal political chaos.

So they remade it. They didn’t license it. They didn’t "reimagine" it for a modern audience. They just took the bones and put them in a different suit.

Cüneyt Arkın, the legendary Turkish action star, took the Bachchan role. If you don’t know Arkın, imagine a man who did his own stunts because the production couldn't afford a harness, let alone a stuntman. He wasn't playing a character so much as he was playing a force of nature with a very specific haircut.

Here’s the friction. In Bombay, Zanjeer was a massive risk. It cost roughly 7 million rupees—a fortune for a film with no songs at the start and a hero who didn't smile. In Istanbul, Kelepçe was a scrap-heap production. The trade-off was simple: you lose the high-fidelity sound and the choreographed polish of Bollywood, but you gain a raw, desperate energy that you can't manufacture in a studio.

The Turkish version cuts the musical numbers. It trims the fat. It turns a three-hour epic into a lean, mean, 90-minute revenge flick. It’s a fascinating look at how a story survives when you strip away the budget and the cultural baggage.

Why is it the "only" one? Because the math stopped working.

By the late eighties, copyright laws actually started to mean something. The cost of a lawsuit became higher than the cost of a script. Also, the tech changed. When home video hit Turkey, the audience didn't want a Turkish guy pretending to be an Indian guy. They wanted the real deal. They wanted Bachchan. They wanted the scale that a struggling Istanbul studio could never replicate.

Today, we live in a world of "seamless integration." Netflix spends billions to make sure you can watch a Spanish heist show and a Korean thriller without ever feeling like you’ve left your couch. Everything is polished. Everything is "localized" by a team of consultants to make sure no one is offended and everyone is engaged.

Kelepçe is the opposite of that. It’s messy. It’s a movie that shouldn’t exist. It’s a reminder that before the algorithm told us what to watch, cinema was a wild, lawless frontier where a hit in Mumbai could be reborn in a Turkish basement just because some producer thought the horse nightmare was a cool bit.

We’ve traded that weirdness for efficiency. We have the original Zanjeer in 4K now. We have subtitles that are grammatically correct and metadata that tracks our heart rate while we watch. We have everything we asked for.

But you have to wonder if we lost something when we stopped being allowed to steal from each other.

Does a story even matter if it doesn't survive a bad dub and a low-budget remake?