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‘I want calm in our building,” says the landlord of a couple who have been purged from their jobs in the film Yellow Letters, before asking them to leave the premises. “We’re all responsible for keeping the calm here”. Turkish cinema, however, has never been less inclined to keep the peace. İlker Çatak’s Yellow Letters and Emin Alper’s Salvation, two politically outspoken films that examine Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s autocratic regime, shared the top prizes at this year’s Berlinale: the Golden Bear for Çatak and Silver for Alper.
These striking works share a lot more. Both titles are co-produced by Liman, an indie film company from Turkey. Nadir Öperli, Salvation’s producer, co-produced Yellow Letters alongside Enis Köstepen who produced and co-wrote Çatak’s film. Both in their mid-40s, they are key figures in the new wave of Turkish cinema that has risen from the ashes of Yeşilçam, the national film industry body that collapsed in the late 1980s. Aesthetically bold yet accessible, and steeped in Turkey’s rich tradition of dissent, their projects expose Turkey at a precarious moment of political repression and economic hardship.
In its own way, this new wave embraces the legacy of Yılmaz Güney, the imprisoned and exiled Kurdish director whose masterpiece The Road won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1982. A military junta had run Turkey since 1980, and Güney dared break the silence about what that did to the country, particularly the Kurdish minority. His film’s footage was smuggled out of the country, where the film remained banned until 1999.
The 00s, when producer duo Öperli and Köstepen came of age, were a more optimistic time for the country. Turkey won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2003, the country’s first modern art museum, Istanbul Modern, opened in 2004, and Orhan Pamuk became the first Turk to win a Nobel Prize in 2006. Erdoğan, then prime minister, was even pledging to make Turkey a full member of the EU. But those gilded years of economic liberalisation didn’t lead to great cinema. Instead, rose-tinted glasses and orientalist tropes dominated Turkey’s depictions in film, much to the delight of Turkey’s ministry of culture and tourism. One major exception, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, honed his skills to become the master of the slow burn in Turkish cinema in those years. Unlike Salvation and Yellow Letters, Ceylan’s films consider Turkey’s political tribulations in a subtle, non-confrontational way.
In 2026, Turkey’s global standing has changed dramatically, and most political scientists classify the country as an electoral autocracy. Istanbul’s leftist mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, has been jailed for more than a year now, partly because he announced plans to run for president in 2028. The state bans all LGBTQ+ activities; the police treat rainbow flags as terrorist symbols. Submission to the government’s ideology is key to getting a public-sector job; being outspoken on social media can be costly in the private sector. Since the violent crackdown on the Occupy Gezi protests of 2013, an uncanny hush has dominated the country’s cultural sector. Çatak and Alper’s new films depict living in such an autocracy in strikingly original and historically resonant ways.
Derya and Aziz, the couple at the heart of Yellow Letters, are victims of Erdoğan’s purges. More than 1,000 academics were condemned to “civil death” after signing a peace petition in 2016. Charged with “spreading propaganda for a terrorist organization,” the self-styled Academics for Peace lost their civil rights and livelihoods; esteemed professors started new lives by taking on manual work, driving cabs, pumping oil at gas stations, and going into exile in various European countries, including Germany, where Yellow Letters was shot.
Surprisingly, Turkey’s film industry didn’t dare touch this thorny issue for years. When Nejla Demirci tackled the purges in academia in The Decree (2023), the government responded by banning all screenings and distribution of her documentary. Turkey’s leading film festival, the Antalya Golden Orange, was cancelled in 2023 after it refused to show The Decree, fearing state retribution. Several directors whose films ran in the competition pulled out in solidarity. To this day, district governorships around the country continue to ban The Decree’s distribution.
Çatak’s film depicts this climate of fear with grim precision. Aziz (Tansu Biçer), a university professor and dramatist, is fired after advising his students to participate in anti-war protests outside the university. He is, after all, teaching Brecht’s alienation effect that week, but a student informs on his call to attend “the great rehearsal of public politics”. Aziz learns his fate in a yellow envelope: he’s accused of disseminating terrorist propaganda, and incitement to violence and becomes persona non grata overnight. His wife, Derya (Özgü Namal), a successful actor, is purged from the state theatre soon after. Rectors and theatre directors quickly comply with whatever the state says about their employees. Even the couple’s landlord is unforgiving. After a telling-off from the police, he says he can no longer house them.
In Çatak’s film, not only actors, but also their cities, stand in for others: Berlin for Ankara and Hamburg for Istanbul. Collaboration by “ordinary citizens” with a repressive state, in fear of prosecution, gathers fresh resonance when Çatak depicts its effects in the former seat of National Socialism, with its antiquated university halls and justice courts. Yellow Letters shows how quickly fear of economic ruin and career termination can lead people to defend the status quo. Even the accused rebels begin to doubt and reinvent themselves by embracing a safer, apolitical way of life.
Salvation, shot in the eastern Anatolian town of Mardin, offers a similarly dark view of Turkey but has a smaller focus. A tale of two rival, fictional Kurdish tribes, the Hazerans and Bezaris, it is loosely based on the Bilge village massacre in Mardin in 2009. “Village guards” are at the centre of both Alper’s film and the 2009 atrocity. Employed by the Turkish state, these militias freely bear arms and carry a get out of jail-free card for any violent or corrupt act in return for battling Kurdish militants. In the massacre, two village guards had killed at least 44 people in a neighbouring town using automatic weapons and grenades.
Salvation is a meditation on how leaders holding delusional beliefs can employ religious rhetoric to lead followers to violence. Its protagonist, Mesut (Caner Cindoruk), raises panic about the perceived evil of the Bezaris and weaponises his people’s fears. At the start of the film, the Bezaris return to their land from the city and aim to get employment as village guards. Hazerans, who protected their lands in their absence, won’t allow that. Fired-up locals, hungry for more land, government work, and domination of their region, follow Mesut’s lead. The mystic religious leader promises “salvation” from the other side and conducts his political messaging through dream interpretation: he claims to have prophetic visions meant to guide the future of Hazerans. The moment has arrived, he says, to kill them all.
Alper’s film issues a chilling warning against strongmen around the world – from Erdoğan to Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump – who weaponise words to unleash irrational fears against university professors, NGO workers, or the likes of George Soros. The outcome of such ideological programming is uncontrollable and perilous.
Unlike the directors of these highly successful films, Güney faced imprisonment in Turkey and died in exile in France. Alper, who continues to live in Turkey, teaches in the humanities and social sciences department at Istanbul Technical University, and has run Istanbul’s influential arthouse theatre Sinematek since 2021. Çatak, born in Berlin to Turkish immigrants, spent his school years in Istanbul before returning to Germany, where he has made films since 2005. Their debt to Güney’s legacy is clear and enormous. Like the Kurdish master of Turkish cinema, they are fearless in breaking the silence.
