Yellow Letters: Politics without slogans

When ideology moves into the living room and care becomes control. The 76th Berlinale was a mix of moral exaggeration and poetic restraint.

It is one of the ritualised disappointments of a festival that, in the end, your own favourite rarely wins – and just as rarely does the objectively ‘best’ film. The award usually goes to the best compromise, the film that represents the strongest common denominator within the jury: aesthetically viable, politically relevant and discursively communicable. This year, the decision for the Golden Bear for Best Film fell on ‘Yellow Letters’ by German-Turkish director İlker Çatak. A choice that is less surprising than it is consistent in retrospect.

Çatak’s most political film to date does not unfold its effect through spectacular images, but through a structural setting: Ankara is located in Berlin, Istanbul in Hamburg. This shift is not merely a production gimmick, but is seen as a deliberate aesthetic alienation. When ‘Gott steh uns bei’ (God help us) suddenly appears on old German buildings, the resonance chamber shifts. The supposedly national becomes universal. The political crisis becomes readable as an anthropological condition.

The focus is on the breakdown of relationships under ideological pressure. Çatak is less interested in programmatic statements than in micro-erosion: the gradual silencing, the unspoken, the shifting of loyalties. Particularly striking are the film-within-a-film and theatre scenes, in which art appears not as a promise of salvation, but as self-questioning. Does theatre save the world? The question is asked – but not answered affirmatively. In Çatak’s work, cinema also eludes the pathos of self-aggrandisement. At best, it can open up spaces.

With all this ‘familiarity,’ the escalation surrounding the daughter becomes too obvious for a moment, breaking out of the fine script corset almost brutally, making Çatak almost didactic. The transformation of an intellectual towards patriarchal harshness seems abrupt, as if the script needed an unnecessarily exaggerated intensification. But this objection concerns the dramaturgy at best, not the diagnosis. Yellow Letters formulates a finding that points beyond Turkey. Political polarisation is not a local phenomenon. It pervades societies worldwide – and it begins in the private sphere. In this respect, the Golden Bear is less an award than a confirmation of a thesis.

The village as a state of the world

The Grand Jury Prize (Silver Bear) went to ‘Kurtuluş’ by Emin Alper. Alper remains true to his preferred setting: the remote village as a projection screen for social tensions. In ‘Burning Days’ (Kurak Günler), which ran in Cannes in 2022, he had already shown how local power structures mirror global mechanisms. In ‘Salvation’, too, the feud between two clans in a geographical microcosm becomes a magnifying glass for a present in which hate speech and resentment are no longer marginal but structuring.

In Alper’s work, the village is not a place of folklore, but a political laboratory. The distance to the periphery is only apparent.

What is being negotiated there is the erosion of democratic discourse as a whole. The echoes of the hate speech chanted here are currently reverberating on the streets all over the world. In this respect, Alper’s film fits seamlessly into a competition field that strikingly often addressed the intimacy of politics.

Intimacy under state supervision

The Jury Prize (Silver Bear) was awarded to ‘Queen at Sea’ by Lance Hammer. Films about dementia tend to portray decline as an existential drama – think of Haneke’s “Amour” or Zeller’s ‘The Father’. Hammer starts earlier and shifts the focus: the film centres not only on the loss of cognitive abilities, but also on the question of autonomy and consent.

The scene in which the police enter the bedroom because a mother with dementia is allegedly unable to consent to sex with her husband marks the aesthetic and moral core of the film. An intimate moment becomes an administrative act. Care is transformed into control. Hammer shows the incapacitation of old age as an act of moral self-assurance. At times, this takes on a certain didactic sharpness reminiscent of the social realist tradition of Ken Loach.

But it is precisely here that comparisons with Sarah Polley’s ‘Away from Her’ come to mind, that quiet, masterful debut about dementia that worked with restraint and formal precision. Polley told a story of loss without stylising institutional apparatuses as antagonists. Hammer’s film is more confrontational, more immediate, perhaps less subtle. And yet there is a remarkable tenderness underlying his indictment. The actors work with glances, pauses, touches – gestures that make love visible, especially at the moment when it is most vulnerable.

Music, masks, manuscripts

The Silver Bear for Best Director went to Grant Gee for Everybody Digs Bill Evans. In strictly composed black-and-white images, Gee tells the story of jazz pianist Bill Evans after the death of his bassist Scott LaFaro. ‘I’m outside of life’ – this sentence runs through the film like a broken chord. Here, biography becomes a study of isolation, addiction and artistic self-alienation.

Sandra Hüller received the Silver Bear for her role for best leading performance in ‚Rose‘. Her character, a soldier living as a man in the 17th century, carries the bullet that tore her face apart as a talisman. Hüller’s performance is physical, reduced, with an inner consistency that translates the historical material into contemporary questions of identity.

The best screenplay went to Geneviève Dulude-de Celles for ‘Nina Roza’, while ‘Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)’ by Anna Fitch and Banker White was honoured for its outstanding artistic contribution – a film that translates visual and musical structures into a unique form.

The films that linger

And yet it is often the films that do not win awards that linger in the memory – perhaps more quietly, but more lastingly.

‘Bu Shi Mo Sheng Ren’ (We Are All Strangers) by Anthony Chen is one such film this year.

 Chen tells a story of migration, precariousness and moral responsibility in a tone that inevitably recalls Edward Yang’s ‘Yi Yi – A One and a Two’. This quiet, comprehensive tenderness, which does not dramatically exaggerate even painful impositions, but captures them in patient observation, pervades Chen’s film from the first to the last shot.

An elderly couple travels through Singapore in an air-conditioned 187 bus – because it’s cooler there and because you can see more. This view is the programme: attentive, calm, without cynicism. The son ekes out a living as a Grab driver in the platform economy, while the father bears the weariness of a man who has been fighting against slipping down the social ladder for decades. The Malaysian partner, who has been living without citizenship for 30 years, lives in a state of permanent degradation. Even the trade in counterfeit medicines does not become a thriller here, but rather a moral test.

Chen does not formulate slogans. He observes. His political statement lies in the form, in the rhythm, in the refusal to exaggerate. Perhaps it was precisely this subtlety that was less acceptable to a jury looking for a clearer sign. But in memory, it is precisely this restraint that unfolds an almost magical grandeur.

This also applies to ‘A Family’ by Mees Peijnenburg, which received a Special Mention in Generation 14plus, but could also have won a prize in the competition. At first glance, the film is a divorce drama from the perspective of two teenagers, Elis and Nina. But if you look closely, you realise that there is more at stake here than family strife. The family appears as a microcosm of political structures. The egos of the adults, speechlessness, power games – all of this reflects larger social dynamics.

Peijnenburg succeeds in showing the madness of a marriage that was once love and is now hate without being one-sided. The dance scene between the father and the children breaks down the barriers, a poetic tracking shot through the family’s home reveals the fault lines of an entire (marital) life, and the children’s counter-cut scene of eating chips seems like a hesitant attempt at reconciliation with a life that has disappeared. In these moments, the film subtly addresses big politics: systems that break down on a small scale, societies that reorganise themselves in their most intimate cells. Here, the family is a mirror of our highly politicised world.

The debate about politics

This politicisation was also evident at the festival itself, as the discussion about jury president Wim Wenders hung over everything. A German podcast journalist, previously uninvolved in the film world, believed he had proven the lack of politicisation of Wenders and the jury, particularly on the subject of the Middle East, by asking provocative questions – an escalation that quickly took on a life of its own. The wording seemed like a general suspicion being thrown into the room: as if one wanted to deny one of the defining auteur filmmakers of New German Cinema precisely that element that has always underpinned his work – the connection between poetry and politics.

Above all, however, the provocation did not do justice to this year’s competition. Rarely has a programme been so clearly permeated by political issues: from Çatak’s analysis of ideological polarisation to Alper’s study of collective hardening to Hammer’s examination of state welfare and individual autonomy. Added to this were numerous contributions from and about the Middle East that dealt with the relationship between power, memory and identity. The debate therefore seemed like a sideshow – loud but thin on content, grotesquely reminiscent of Emerald Fennell’s recent cinematic adaptation of the literary classic Wuthering Heights, nothing more than a storm in an Instagram glass.

And perhaps this is precisely where the real outcome of this Berlinale lies: politics did not appear here as a slogan, not as a decorative commitment, but as a structure – as a fine crack in the private sphere, as a barely noticeable but persistent tension in the intimate sphere. The Golden Bear for Yellow Letters sends a clear signal about this attitude. Not as a final judgement on a year’s output, but as an expression of a moment in which clarity seemed more important than any calculated, algorithmically optimised sophistication.