MASIFF: Yellow Letters (2025)

Director: İlker Çatak | Year: 2025 | Rating: Unclassified 15+ | Runtime: 127 mins | Country: Germany, France, Türkiye | Genre: Drama | Language: Turkish

This Golden Bear winner is a timely portrait of artists suffering persecution from the filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge.

Playwright Aziz and actor Derya are a husband-and-wife pair known for their avant-garde theatre works. But when they receive menacing ‘yellow letters’ – official government edicts – labelling their work “too political”, they swiftly lose the platform and careers they’ve spent so long building, and their life begins to unravel. As the couple move from Ankara to Istanbul with their 13-year-old daughter, relationships begin to fray and ethics become compromised, the hostility of the Turkish regime infecting the family dynamic.

Shooting in Germany so as to preserve his own artistic freedom – with intertitles announcing from the outset that Berlin is serving as Ankara and Hamburg as Istanbul – Çatak uses his domestic drama as a spur for greater conversations about the rise of censorship and anti-art regimes.

Winner – Golden Bear, Berlinale 2026

“A well-observed and performed family drama … very much a story for our times.” – Time Out