Yellow Letters

BERLINALE 2026 - İlker Çatak's turkish language film dealing with heritage land's gloomy political situation.

Yellow Letters certainly starts with a firm grip: the first shots of the film estabilish masterfully and with ease the dramatic nucleus, initiating the core elements of the storyline and some truly clever quasi-metafictional gimmicks that are rarely seen in a film of this target. Had such focus been maintained evenly throughout the film, it would have definitely qualified as a rightful follow-up to the oeuvre of the filmmaker behind Teacher’s Lounge.

The film follows a playwright and an actress, a couple that raises their teenage daughter in Ankara. Amidst daring choices in their theatrical play and an apparently trivial episode, their life is suddenly fully in turmoil. Yellow Letters immediately estabilishes a very clear political theme, exposing the suffocating dynamics with which the Erdogan regime (never expressely uttering his name) suppresses dissent both in the artistic field and the academic one — as one of the characters is also an University professor. Like few films in the turkish language, Yellow Letters dares to pose many of the issues relative to the government’s repression of the kurdish minority and censorship/persecution of dissenters. But such political edge — as the Berlinale jury has recently clearly pointed out — seems insufficient. At least, in Yellow Letters’ case, it is genuinely a core aspect that doesn’t leave much else of interest to discuss, except a specific solution.