It was serendipitous and ironic for me to have begun my viewing of Berlinale films with the one that rests firmly on the cross-section of arts and politics. Ilker Catak’s Yellow Letters is about an artist couple, Derya (Ozgu Namal) and Aziz (Tansu Bicer), in Ankara, who find life upended at the hands of the authoritarian regime. The repercussions of absolutism don’t just inform the theme of the film, they are also implicit in the way Catak, a German filmmaker of Turkish descent, flaunts having shot the film in Germany, with Berlin filling in as Ankara and Hamburg playing Istanbul. Would President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who is not mentioned directly in the film) have let a film critical of his conservatism and repression be shot in the country?
The Germany-France-Turkey co-production that had its world premiere in the festival’s competition section is based on the script by Catak himself, Ayda Catak and Enis Kostepen. The linear narrative kicks off with the happy life of the theatre actress and the professor-writer and their teenaged daughter, Ezgi (Leyla Smyrna Cabas). Their probing, subversive new play opens to critical appreciation and is running to a full house even as Ezgi jokes about its three-hour-long duration and her parents’ supposed belief in saving the world with theatre.
Also present at the premiere is the governor, whose request for a photo is rebuffed by Derya, as is the offer of a TV role by a casting agent from Istanbul. In the midst of it all, people’s protests against governmental repression are in full swing. The art for art’s sake premise, as opposed to political responsibility, currently trending, unwittingly thanks to the festival, gets punctured by the filmmaker with a single significant line uttered by Aziz when he tells his students that there is little he can teach them about dramaturgy if they haven’t seen the State’s theatre playing out in the streets. In other words, art can’t disengage itself from reality and flourish in a bubble or void.
Seen as dissenters, their play gets removed from the repertoire, they lose their jobs and home, get threatened by cops and deserted by some colleagues and neighbours, even as others stand by them in unquestioning support. They move court against the government and shift temporarily to Aziz’s mother’s home in Istanbul, which is when the reality of making ends meet stares them in the eye, as does the growing tension between them and their constant skirmishes with the daughter. What is the way out? Will their ideology win the day or pragmatism? As the personal, professional and familial situation spins out of control, Catak ends on an ambiguous, unclear note, which complicates one’s response to the film and diminishes its impact a bit. Has it been left deliberately open-ended because Catak doesn’t want to feed us any answers? Or as Aziz and Derya themselves put it, in taking fate into their hands rather than live in uncertainty, have they decided to co-opt and conform? From asserting, “Don’t fear problems. Fear, fear itself”, have they fallen prey to fear? Have the dissenters turned opportunists? Or is there more to it than the idea of right and wrong? Do the monetary and ethical aspects of the arts have to always remain in sharp split or can they be balanced?
Catak brings moral questions, in this case of survival and artistic integrity, to the fore as he did with the ethics of human powerplay in his previous 2023 film, the brilliant The Teachers’ Lounge. And as with that film, there’s a sense of propulsion and urgency here, driven by Judith Kaufmann’s cinematography and Marvin Miller’s music, with an added layer of the constant overlap of the world of theatre and the real. Most memorable of all, however, are the faces and presence of a compelling and confident Namal and the embittered yet committed Bicer. Tough to take your eyes off the charismatic couple.