Yellow Letters

 One begins by yielding on words, and one ends by yielding on things. — Talleyrand 

Çatak orchestrates a defusal apparatus as restrained as it is implacable, and seeks to transform the contemporary obsession with surveillance, cancellation, and discredit into an anthropology of fear. The initial ripple is almost imperceptible: an anti-war demonstration, a tide of bodies traversed by the stubborn color of flags and banners, the shot lingering on Aziz as he watches, takes part, exists politically in the sole act of looking. This is enough, along with a few posts published on social media, for the mechanism to set itself in motion. 

In the classroom, Aziz improvises a provocative theater lesson on Waiting for Godot: the pedagogy of waiting, the suspension of meaning, the dignity of the subject who resists even when every horizon of redemption is withdrawn. A student records; a pro-government television channel mounts, cuts, and re-stitches Beckett's discourse as though it were a subversive manifesto, a university lecture instrumentally bent into the alleged apologia of terrorism. 

From this there erupts, at the threshold of Aziz's university office, a brawl: bodies colliding where only the grammar of dialogue ought to be exercised. Then Aziz's institutional password is changed by a hand that refuses to name itself; the university suspends from teaching all those who have signed, spoken, imagined; Derya's stage production is cancelled by an order from on high, in keeping with that verticality of command that despises any cross-examination. Once they have taken refuge at his mother's house, Derya receives an offer to return to the stage on a single condition: betray her own ideals in exchange for money, accept a symbolic cohabitation with the very power that has exiled them. 

The film's philosophical premise might be condensed in that line which traverses the work like a basso continuo — do not fear the problem, but fear the fear of the problem — and it is in this torsion that its deepest intelligence is at stake. What wounds the two protagonists is not only the repression — a given, objectifiable, even confrontable event; it is the dust cloud of uncertainty that power disperses in the air, the deliberate opacity of procedures, the systemic deferral of any answer. Authoritarianism as a fact is an adversary; uncertainty, by contrast, is totalitarian: it penetrates sleep, reconfigures affective synapses, compels each of us to internalize the judge. 

The film stages, with admirable expressive economy, the precise moment in which private life buckles beneath the weight of the evidence that everything is political. There is no domestic gesture, no marital conversation, no professional choice that is not invested by the impact of power; and the couple, which was first and foremost a community of shared meanings, becomes a site of ethical antagonism. Derya entertains the hypothesis of compromise — a stage, a fee, material survival — while Aziz perceives it as abdication. 
Çatak refuses any consolatory pedagogy: neither of them is in the wrong, and the conflict between ethical responsibility and the acceptance of compromise does not resolve itself, because it cannot resolve itself, in an age in which every public gesture is already, potentially, evidence for the prosecution. 

A passing nod goes to I'm Still Here (2024) by Walter Salles: there too an authoritarian regime — the Brazilian military dictatorship — bursts into the domestic space of a couple of intellectuals, and the female figure, Eunice Paiva like Derya, becomes the custodian of an ethical memory that power would seek to erase. Two films which, from different latitudes, share the same phenomenology of intimate resistance. 

And yet, precisely at the point where the film aspires to its maximum ambition, a zone of shadow lies hidden, one which international criticism has registered with honesty. Yellow Letters is a work that speaks aloud where it might perhaps have benefited from a whisper: its thematic weave appears, in more than one passage, underlined with excessive didactic clarity, as though the trust in its own allegorical apparatus yielded before the urgency to be understood. 

The dramaturgical energy, paradoxically, slips beneath the threshold which the subject would demand: where one would expect the incandescence of Kafkaesque anguish, the emotional temperature occasionally remains tepid, controlled, almost pacified by a direction that prefers composition to combustion. The choice not to name the regime, to disguise the cities, to keep the historical referent suspended — a politically lucid gesture, as has been said — produces, conversely, an effect of evaporation of the real: anyone familiar with the biographical trajectory of Turkish academics and artists over the past decade may sense a gap between the documentary intensity of that lived experience and the almost Mitteleuropean polish with which the film renders it. 

The risk, in other words, is that the allegory, broadening into a universal container, ends up losing the specific grain of the suffering that originates it; and that certain scenes — such as the domestic drift involving the adolescent daughter, veering into a melodrama that is perhaps unnecessary — derail the otherwise austere geometry of the whole. One senses, here, a conceptual timidity: the author observes authoritarianism from a respectful threshold, but does not always step fully across it, as though afraid of soiling his cinema with the viscosity the subject demands. 

These limitations, however, do not refute the scope of the work; they merely outline its boundaries. The red of the banners, the theatrical choreography of Godot, the collective suspension of teachers, the brawl on the threshold of a classroom that ought to be the free territory of thought: all these fragments compose a dramaturgy of the boundary, in which the sentence uttered in a lecture, the opinion entrusted to a social platform, the face caught at a demonstration, can be cut out, recomposed, re-edited by the regime into a counter-discourse that annihilates the author. Yellow Letters denounces, with a lucidity that hurts even when it appears muffled, the structural peril of those who live, express themselves, and exist on the basis of their ideas and imaginings: these, founded on real facts, remain pliable matter for a government that admits no cross-examination, that disposes of truth as if it were exclusive property. 

In this choice to have Berlin play the role of Ankara, and Hamburg that of Istanbul, the director's true political gesture condenses itself: to refuse the illusion that the phenomenon is elsewhere, to depathologize it, to restore it as a European, Western, neighboring possibility. Çatak's camera neither flagellates nor indulges: it observes. And in its observation — severe, and at times overly composed — it stitches back together, as far as it can, the fracture that authoritarian power seeks to produce between the individual and his own word.

The Berlin award goes to an imperfect but necessary film, because, before being a denunciation, Yellow Letters is a phenomenology of erosion: the way in which a thinking subject is dismantled piece by piece, without spectacle, simply by changing his password, simply by suspending his show, simply by delivering him, on a morning like any other, a yellow envelope. 

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is that which is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. 
— Italo Calvino