İlker Çatak's “Yellow Letters” marks an early highlight of this year's Berlinale. Following the unexpected success of his previous film, “The Teachers Room", which won more than half a dozen German film awards and was eventually nominated for an Oscar, expectations for the Hamburg-based director's new film were particularly high. İlker Çatak, who once again collaborated with his producer Ingo Fließ, took a gamble and shot ‘Yellow Letters’ exclusively in Turkish.
The story is set in Ankara and Istanbul, but because it was difficult to film there, Çatak decided to take a radical step. Above a panorama of Berlin, the caption ‘Berlin as Ankara’ appears, and above Hamburg, ‘Hamburg as Istanbul’. What could cause lasting irritation works surprisingly well. Derya (Özgü Namal) is a successful actress at the National Theatre in Ankara, her husband Aziz (Tansu Biçer) is a playwright and university professor. One day, they become the target of political repression; he and several colleagues are accused of subversive propaganda and supporting terrorist organisations, which in Turkey is a euphemism for sympathising with the militant Kurdish PKK.
Derya's successful play disappears from the theatre programme, the doorman hands her a yellow letter informing her that she has been dismissed. When the police show up to search their home, her landlord wants to get rid of them. They move with their 14-year-old daughter to Aziz's mother's apartment in Istanbul, where the political pressure is less intense. Aziz takes a job as a taxi driver, Derya gets an offer for a TV series. The social and financial degradation is so drastic that it threatens to break up the family.
‘How do we deal with a system that condemns us to civil death, i.e. excludes us from social life, leaving us physically alive but legally, socially and professionally erased?’ This is how Ilker Çatak sums up the central question of his film. In my opinion, ‘Gelbe Briefe’ is a perfect film, with a polished script that gives the two main actors the opportunity to attack each other fiercely in razor-sharp dialogues. The scenes of the argument, when their secure existence falls apart, are among the best that I have seen in the cinema in recent times.
There's also Judith Kaufmann's camera work, who apparently had to rely on her intuition a lot because everyone on set spoke Turkish. After ‘Das Lehrerzimmer’ (The Teachers' Room) and ‘Heldin’ (Late Shift), which was shown in the Panorama sidebar last year and made it onto the Oscar shortlist, her images create a consistent tension without the camera pushing itself into the foreground. In between, there are flashes of surprising humour that ensure that ‘Gelbe Briefe’ does not descend into a drama of despair.
The film's political backdrop is the wave of purges in the sciences and culture between 2016 and 2019, during which approximately two thousand artists and academics in Turkey were suspended and brought to trial. The reason for this was the signing of a peace petition.
İlker Çatak, who also co-wrote the screenplay, impressively stages how a creeping process of political intimidation takes on forms that threaten people's livelihoods. We think to ourselves that it won't go that far over here. But as Horace already knew in his satires: ‘De te fabula narratur’ (The story is about you). ‘Yellow Letters’ is already a favourite for the Golden Bear, and it would take a miracle for the film not to win one or two major awards.
The third feature film by the Tunisian-French director Leyla Bouzid, ‘La voix basse’ (In a Whisper), is a drama about several generations of women in a middle-class family in Tunisia. Thirty-two-year-old Lilia (Eva Bouteraa) returns to Sousse, south of Tunis, for her uncle's funeral. She soon realises that her uncle, although he had been married, was gay and died in unusual circumstances. Something her grandmother refuses to accept, even after his death.
Hiam Abbas, an international star with Palestinian roots (known for her role in the series “Succession”, for example) plays Lilias' divorced mother, a self-confident doctor. The relationship between mother and daughter is not devoid of conflict, which becomes apparent when Lilias' secret life in France moves into the spotlight. Nobody in her family knows that she is in a lesbian relationship and has brought her girlfriend with her to Tunisia. No wonder she finds it highly embarrassing when the question arises of when she finally intends to marry and have children.
Avoiding a didactic approach, director and screenwriter Leyla Bouzid illuminates a complex web of intra-family dynamics and impresses with her precise depiction of characters. Lilia's investigations into her uncle's death lead her into the clandestine world of male homosexuality, which is punishable by law in Tunisia. Whereas ‘l'homosexualité féminine est considérée inoffensive’ (female homosexuality is considered harmless), as a lawyer laconically explains. Eva Bouteraa, in her first feature film, is captivating in the role of Lilia, as is the ensemble of women from several generations.