Salvation

Emin Alper has been a fixture of the festival circuit since Beyond the Hill won the Caligari prize at the Berlinale in 2012, and Kurtuluş brought him the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 76th edition in 2026 — the runner-up prize to İlker Çatak's Yellow Letters, making it a Berlinale where the top two awards both went to Turkish directors working with European money.

The setting is a remote village to which an exiled clan is permitted to return, and the material is the land dispute that drove them out in the first place. Caner Cindoruk plays Mesut, who begins receiving what he understands to be divine instruction and uses it to contest his brother's authority over the community. Alper's earlier films have all worked this seam — rural Anatolia as a place where property, family and belief are the same argument conducted in three vocabularies — and this is his largest-scale treatment of it, a six-country co-production shot in Turkish, Kurdish and Arabic.

The jury's citation and most reviews out of Berlin focused on the film's refusal to adjudicate Mesut's visions: the audience is given no vantage point from which to decide whether he is a prophet, an opportunist or unwell, and the village has to decide anyway. Alper's régime of long, patient takes gives that ambiguity room to become genuinely uncomfortable.