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German filmmaker Ilker Çatak, born in Berlin to Turkish immigrant parents, enjoys putting his stressed-out characters through the wringer. Leonie Benesch delivered a masterclass in anxiety-attacking tension in one very bad day at school in Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge. That gem took home two awards at the 2023 Berlinale. Two years later, the writer-director has claimed the festival’s big prize, the Golden Bear, with Yellow Letters.
An intriguingly metatextual work, co-written with Ayda Meryem Çatak and Enis Köstepen, it opens in the Turkish capital, Ankara, before shifting the action to Istanbul. Only Çatak and his cinematographer Judith Kaufmann film in neither of these locations. Instead, jaunty intertitle cards announce: ‘Berlin as Ankara’ and ‘Hamburg as Istanbul’. Even the locations are victims of authoritarianism here.
Yellow Letters follows the implosion of a family after state censorship strips a married couple, actor Derya (Özgü Namal) and her playwright and drama professor husband Aziz (Tansu Biçer), of their culturally daring careers. They’ve been used to freely criticising the government on social media, and now their work is deemed ‘too political’.
Of course it is – as is all art. As rumbling protests throng in the streets, Derya’s latest play is promptly cancelled and she’s fired from the company, while Aziz is let go from his university gig too. With money increasingly tight, they move in with his mother (İpek Bilgin) in Istanbul, alongside their teenage daughter, Ezgi (Leyla Smyrna Cabas). They want her to go to a private school they can’t afford, but she isn’t interested, a point of contention.
What follows is the whistling steam that emits from a pot on the boil
What follows is the whistling steam that emits from a pot on the boil. Aziz, now driving cabs, prepares to face the courts, while Derya accepts a TV gig with a station that openly criticised her and her husband.
If Yellow Letters – the government summons the couple face down – isn’t quite as tight as The Teachers’ Lounge, with too few truly tense moments and a frustrating coyness in placing the story firmly in the global picture, then it’s certainly a well-observed and performed family drama. It’s heartbreaking to watch Namal and Biçer getting ratty with one another, as the pressure builds and Çatak’s slicing dialogue ricochets. As this tight-knit clan frays in the face of this vilification, they listen to one another less and less. And in that sense, it’s very much a story for our times.
Yellow Letters premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival.