‘Yellow Letters’ Review: A Turkish Artist Couple Fractures but Never Falls Apart in ‘Teachers’ Lounge’ Director’s Politically Vexed Latest

“The Teachers’ Lounge” writer/director İlker Çatak shifts his attentions from the mob mentality of a Berlin classroom to scenes from a marriage between a Turkish artist couple being targeted by their state. Shot in Germany but set between Ankara and Istanbul, “Yellow Letters” follows the pragmatic Derya (Özgü Namal) and her more egotistical, indignant husband Aziz (Tansu Biçer), along with their daughter Ezgi (Leyla Smyrna Cabas), as they’re forced out of one city into the ether. And for reasons that are deliberately opaque, as Çatak casts the Turkish parliamentary state and its arbitrations in a decidedly Kafkaesque light. On the eve of Derya and Aziz’s new play, it’s shut down by the government for no evident reason via “yellow letters” officially laying off the couple and their company.

Where “The Teachers’ Lounge” tightened the noose on an idealistic teacher being investigated by her administration after a series of student thefts and playground-level dramas, “Yellow Letters” takes a more capacious narrative approach to a family that fractures but never falls apart. Even as Derya sells out to star in a popular Turkish soap opera for a TV network that’s likely hand in hand with the state government, their marriage never crumbles despite bureaucratic strain. Their commitment to one another makes “Yellow Letters” most compelling, especially as anchored by two brilliant performances, even as the film threatens to cram in too many narrative swerves and gets weighted down by the requisite courtroom scenes, where they’re forced to answer to their “crimes.” Whatever they are.

“Yellow Letters” is set against a backdrop of swirling student protests against a government that, while technically a democracy, is under the stranglehold of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s executive presidency — where the media, especially, is under state control. Sound familiar?

Çatak fashions a film that’s both a gripping marital drama and a rallying cry against artist censorship. Derya refuses to take a photo with the governor on their play’s opening night, one of many of a pile-up of small grievances that ends up with the family losing their apartment, their landlord no longer comfortable housing them — and certainly not about to address the mold that’s been festering in their flat for some time. Meanwhile, professor Aziz’s classroom has been trashed, his courses suspended, and he’s forced to move with his wife and daughter into his mother’s place in Istanbul.

‘Yellow Letters’Courtesy Berlin Film Festival

A title card revealing the location as “Hamburg as Istanbul” tips “Yellow Letters” in the direction of a self-aware exercise not meant to be taken earnestly as vérité drama. That’s apt given the central couple’s position as playwrights and thespians, and in Istanbul, they set to work on a new play, called “Yellow Letters,” that will interrogate their experience back in Ankara. It’s also unsettling how one half of this roundly secular couple starts slipping back into Muslim traditions, as Derya goes on a fast, and their daughter is sent to the mosque. A tense relationship between Derya and her brother yields a fractious dinner later in the film, revealing a family that’s become destabilized at every turn. Her “only dream is to get through the day,” Derya says at one point, the radiating burner on the stove looking awfully tempting.

Çatak’s anti-state message acquires an ambiguous power as the movie wends onward, with an enigmatic final shot that finds Aziz tasting clear-skies freedom but still from behind confines of a sort. Namal and Biçer’s performances are top-tier, even as the film’s running time forces them into behaviors that start to feel repetitive, with Çatak underlining his message yet again in even bolder-faced terms. There’s some forced melodrama in the last third that feels out of step with a film that has so far thrummed on painful inevitabilities and spiraling-out bureaucratic nonsense. In other words, material that doesn’t rely on the pistons of a plot.

Çatak (who is German-born but of Turkish descent) based the film on his encounters and conversations with Turkish artists who, between 2019 and 2020, were dismissed from their positions over charges like signing a peace petition or smoking cigarettes backstage. People were worn down by the waiting patterns imposed upon them by the state; in this film, the couple opts to break free through artistic expression, and mounting a new, dissident work.

That the couple’s transgression in the state’s eyes is never fully explained makes “Yellow Letters” all the more potent — a stark reminder of how censorship, travel bans, and forced resettlement are stifling artists globally. That’s an issue we’ve seen play out in manifold ways all year. “Yellow Letters” asks us to wake up to that reality, but leaves us with no manual for how to fix it. Because there isn’t one. That the film was shot in Germany reminds that this can happen anywhere, not just over there.

Grade: B

“Yellow Letters” premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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