Yellow Letters

İlker Çatak followed The Teachers' Lounge — the 2023 Oscar nominee that made a staffroom feel like a bunker — with a film about a marriage and a state, and won the Golden Bear with it at the 76th Berlinale in February 2026. It is a German-French-Turkish co-production shot largely in Hamburg and Berlin, with the two cities standing in for Ankara and Istanbul, a production choice that is itself part of the subject.

Özgü Namal and Tansu Biçer play a married pair of theatre artists whose work has just reached an audience and whose employment ends shortly afterwards. Çatak builds the film the way he built the last one: in institutional rooms, through conversations where everyone is being careful, and with a rising sense that the rules being applied were never written down. A sequence staged with some 250 extras in the main auditorium of the Berliner Ensemble gives the film its one moment of scale, and it is used for pressure rather than spectacle.

Reviews out of Berlin were strong — 86% on Rotten Tomatoes — and the jury's decision read as a statement as much as a verdict, handing the festival's top prize to a film about artists losing their livelihoods for political reasons. It went on to the Karlovy Vary Horizons strand and picked up German Film Award nominations for Best Fiction Film and Best Director.