Yellow Letters

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 actror 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.

Winner of the Berlin International Film Festival’s top prize, İlker Çatak’s follow-up to The Teachers’ Lounge is an all-too-timely depiction of state-administered suppression of artists and intellectuals, reflecting how authoritarian regimes erode the humanity of those under their boot. 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.

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival