German writer-director Ilker Çatak presents his second feature, Yellow Letters [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Ilker Çatak
scheda film], in the Berlinale competition. After his multi-award-winning The Teachers' Lounge [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: İlker Çatak
intervista: Leonie Benesch
scheda film], he received plenty of offers from Hollywood studios but preferred to craft a movie that he actually wanted to make.

Cineuropa: Your film has many different layers. What was the starting point?
Ilker Çatak: It started with a love story. I always wanted to make a film about marriage because it can be so loving and tender. On the other hand, it can be so hard, and people can be so mean to each other. For me as a storyteller, this is a dynamic I can relate to, also as a married person. Writing this with my wife, Ayda Meryem Çatak, was even more fun because we were drawing from life. And writing it with Enis Köstepen, who lives in Turkey and is very much interested in politics, and who kept track of things over there, was another valuable element to have because he was providing us with literature and people to talk to.

We wanted to portray a crackdown on a marriage through political repression. Our approach was to show how our leaders are so good at dividing us in order to reign over us. It was a process of fine-tuning it so that half of the audience would side with the male character and the other half with the female one.

Are you more of an idealist like Aziz or a realist like Derya?
I think I am both; otherwise, I couldn’t have written these characters. But I don’t know how much of an idealist I could be if I had children and lived in a country where I needed to come up with a lot of money to send my kids to a good school. I have the luxury of being able to stay idealistic because I live a very modest life. If I were living a life where I needed more money, I would probably already be doing films for the Amazons and Netflixes of this world.

I don’t mean to say that I am a saint, but I want to make the films that I actually want to make. After The Teachers’ Lounge, I had the chance to go and work in the USA for the big studios, but I chose to make this movie, which is not a crowd-pleaser. At least I can look in the mirror and say, “Hey, I protected my artistic integrity.” I didn’t make a Hollywood film. Maybe I will some day, but it would feel like I were killing a baby. I needed to make this film right after The Teachers’ Lounge.

Does the relationship of the couple fracture because of this crisis?
I think the character of a person is revealed when that person is put under pressure. Obviously, these two are put under pressure, and the economic necessities are growing day by day. They get to a point where their true nature is revealed: all of a sudden, this person who seemed to be a modern man bursts out into some toxic guy telling her that he made her. That’s what I love in films, and also in The Teachers’ Lounge: that you put someone under pressure, and their real character starts to crystallise. It’s so easy to cover up the truth when there is no pressure.

Do you consider your film a political wake-up call?
I understand the film as a warning. There is an assault on academia; there is an assault on the arts; there is an assault on free speech. We in the West always thought that these were just values taken for granted. We sometimes forget that somebody had to bleed for them. These values weren’t just given to us; they were fought for.

In Yellow Letters, the character of the couple’s daughter has doubts that culture can save the world. What is your opinion on that?
Why do you think political leaders are waging an assault on culture? It’s because if you control culture, you control power and you control the people. It’s what shaped me in my youth. I grew up with films and cinema, and that gave me my belief system. Even though film hasn’t got that punch that it used to have, because now we have algorithms and they are much more precise in how they intend to shape our brains, I still think that culture has a transformative power.

What made you decide to intentionally show that you used Berlin and Hamburg to stand in for Istanbul and Ankara?
If you think about it, boundaries and borders are illusions – someone probably came up with the idea that there should be a border. It’s just something that humankind has made up. We’re living in this world, we’re breathing the same air, and we’re living under the same sun, but mankind somehow came up with the idea that there should be borders.

Also, sometimes you read reviews, and it says, “In this film, the music is a character of its own” or “The city is a character of its own.” We thought this would actually be a funny thing to do. Why don’t we actually give the city a character? It was also a way of relieving the pressure and making it more playful.

Do you have another project in the pipeline?
I am working on an adaptation of the book Flesh by David Szalay, which won the 2025 Booker Prize. Moreover, I am working on a TV show called Die Enkelin (lit. “The Granddaughter”) by Bernhard Schlink.