Yellow Letters: İlker Çatak’s Film on Art, Politics, and Censorship

İlker Çatak’s fifth film, Yellow Letters, arrives April 30, 2026 via Lucky Red. It follows Derya and Aziz, a Turkish artist couple whose life unravels after Aziz, a lecturer at Ankara University, receives a “yellow letter” firing him. The story, conceived in 2019 during a stay in Istanbul, draws on testimonies of artists hit by arbitrary dismissals after the 2016 coup attempt. Rather than a direct indictment, Çatak examines cracks in relationships and identity. During writing, he questioned his outsider status compared to filmmakers like Emin Alper who lived the repression. Producer Enis Köstepen suggested “exiling” the film: not reconstructing Turkey but evoking it in Germany, among diasporic communities. Berlin is not disguised as Ankara—it remains Berlin, with its TV tower and pro-Ukraine protests. A caption “Berlin as Ankara” breaks the illusion, and Hamburg stands in for Istanbul. This Brechtian alienation device shows the apparatus rather than hiding it. Çatak also cites Martin Scorsese’s “cinema is what enters the frame” to select evocative fragments that create dissonance. The film becomes a broader reflection on shrinking freedom of expression and how relationships redefine when work and speech are lost.