YELLOW LETTERS (GELBE BRIEFE) World Cinema

Turkish-German filmmaker İlker Çatak (THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE, AFI FEST 2023) returns with this thought-provoking allegory about art and authoritarianism, winner of the Golden Bear at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. The film opens with an artistic triumph: lead actress Derya (Özgü Namal) delivers a blistering monologue about resistance in the face of oppression to conclude the latest play written by her husband Aziz (Tansu Biçer). Derya takes a bow at the curtain call, then quickly leaves the theater, avoiding well-wishers and the afterparty, where members of the regime might be present. The language is Turkish, and the contemporary frame of reference would appear to be Turkey in the era of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; however, the film’s opening credits ask the audience to see “Berlin as Ankara,” establishing a theatrical conceit in which German locations stand in for Turkey and inviting them to participate in a cinematic theater of the mind, implicitly understanding that what we are about to see could be made in Germany, but not Turkey. Back home, Aziz and Derya enjoy the evening’s triumph in conversation with their teenage daughter Ezgi (Leyla Smyrna Cabas). Later that week at the university campus where both parents teach in the theater department, Aziz ends class early, encouraging his students to attend the campus protest against the government, saying “If you haven’t seen the state’s theatrics … I can’t teach you anything about dramaturgy.” A student reports him for criticizing the government, “yellow letters” are issued to him, his wife and others involved in the play’s production, and soon both Aziz and Derya are out of work. The family relocates to Istanbul, or “Hamburg as Istanbul,” to live with Aziz’s mother (İpek Bilgin) and regroup. Aziz writes a stripped-down, Brechtian new play inspired by recent events; Derya begins rehearsing in the lead role, but eventually leaves to take a well-paid job on a mainstream television drama. The family’s struggles with political oppression will come to inform every aspect of their personal lives as well, with questions of artistic compromise soon giving way to questions of survival. –Todd Hitchcock