A new wave of defiance: Turkish filmmakers stand up to tyranny | film

‘I “We want peace in our building,” says the landlord of a couple fired from their jobs in the movie “Yellow Letters,” before asking them to leave the building. “We are all responsible for keeping calm here.” But Turkish cinema has never been less inclined to keep the peace. “Yellow Letters” by İlker Çatak and “Salvation” by Emin Alper., Two overtly political films about the authoritarian regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan shared top prizes at this year’s Berlinale: the Golden Bear for Çatak and the Silver Bear for Alper.

These great works have a lot in common. Both titles are produced by Liman, an independent film company from Türkiye. Nader Oberli, producer of Khalas, co-produced Yellow Letters Along with Enes Kostibian who produced and co-wrote the film Kathak. Both in their mid-40s, they are key figures in the new wave of Turkish cinema that has risen from the ashes of Yesilgam, the national film industry body that collapsed in the late 1980s. Their aesthetically bold and accessible projects, steeped in Turkey’s rich oppositional tradition, expose Türkiye to a perilous moment of political repression and economic hardship.

This new wave is, in its own way, embracing the legacy of Yilmaz Güney, the imprisoned and exiled Kurdish director whose masterpiece The Road won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1982. The military junta had run Turkey since 1980, and Güney dared to break the silence about what that might do to the country, especially the Kurdish minority. His film footage was smuggled out of the country, where the film remained banned until 1999.

The 2000s, when the producing duo Oberle and Kostibin came of age, was a more optimistic time for the country. Turkey won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2003, the country’s first modern art museum, Istanbul Modern, opened in 2004, and Orhan Pamuk became the first Turk to win a Nobel Prize in 2006. Erdogan, then prime minister, was even pledging to make Turkey a full member of the European Union. But those golden years of economic liberalization did not lead to great cinema. Instead, rose-colored glasses and Orientalist tropes dominated the depiction of Türkiye in films, much to the delight of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. One major exception is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who honed his skills to become the master of the slow burn in Turkish cinema in those years. Unlike Salvation and Yellow Letters, Ceylan’s films address Turkey’s political ordeals in a subtle and non-confrontational way.

In 2026, Türkiye’s global standing has changed dramatically, and most political scientists classify the country as an electoral autocracy. Istanbul’s leftist mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, has been imprisoned for more than a year now, partly because he announced plans to run for president in 2028. The country bans all LGBTQ+ activities; Police treat rainbow flags as terrorist symbols. Submitting to government ideology is essential to getting a job in the public sector; Being outspoken on social media can be costly in the private sector. Since the violent crackdown on the Occupy Gezi protests of 2013, a strange silence has dominated the country’s cultural sector. Kathak and Alper’s new films depict living in such an authoritarian regime in ways that are innovative, surprising, and historically resonant.

Derya and Aziz, the couple at the heart of Yellow Letters, Victims of Erdogan’s purges. More than 1,000 academics were sentenced to “civil death” after signing a peace petition in 2016. Charged with “spreading propaganda for a terrorist organisation,” Academics for Peace lost their civil rights and livelihoods; The distinguished professors started a new life through manual labor, driving taxis, pumping oil at gas stations, and going into exile in various European countries, including Germany, where the Yellow Letters were shot.

Surprisingly, Turkey’s film industry did not dare to address this thorny issue for years. When Najla Demirci addressed the purges in academia in the Decree (2023), the government responded by banning all screenings and distribution of her documentary. Turkey’s leading Antalya film festival, the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, was canceled in 2023 after it refused to screen the decree, fearing state retaliation. Many directors whose films participated in the competition withdrew in solidarity. To this day, provincial governors across the country continue to ban the distribution of the decree.

Chatak’s film depicts this climate of fear with grim precision. Aziz (Tansu Becher), a university professor and playwright, is expelled after advising his students to participate in anti-war protests outside the university. He is, after all, teaching the alienating effect that Brecht talked about that week, but one student reports being invited to attend “the great rehearsal of public policy.” Aziz learns his fate in a yellow envelope: he is accused of spreading terrorist propaganda and inciting violence and becomes persona non grata overnight. His wife Derya (Ozgu Namal), a successful actress, is fired from the State Theater soon after. University rectors and theater directors are quick to comply with whatever the state says about their employees. Even the couple’s owner is ruthless. After being reprimanded by the police, he said he could no longer house them.

In Çatak’s film, the actors not only replace others but also their cities: Berlin instead of Ankara, Hamburg instead of Istanbul. The collaboration of “ordinary citizens” with an oppressive state, for fear of prosecution, takes on new resonance when Czaczak depicts its traces in the former headquarters of National Socialism, with its antique university halls and courthouses. Yellow Letters shows how quickly fear of economic ruin and career ending can lead people to defend the status quo. Even accused rebels begin to doubt and reinvent themselves by adopting a safer, apolitical lifestyle.

Salvation, Filmed in the eastern Anatolian city of Mardin, the film presents a dark landscape similar to Turkey but with a smaller focus. The story of two fictional Kurdish rival tribes, the Hazaris and the Bazaris, is loosely based on the massacre of the village of Bilge in Mardin in 2009. The “village guards” are the focus of Alper’s film and the atrocities that occurred in 2009. These militias, employed by the Turkish state, carry arms freely and carry a get-out-of-jail card for any violent or corrupt act in exchange for fighting Kurdish militants. In the massacre, two village guards killed at least 44 people in a nearby town using automatic weapons and grenades.

Salvation It is a meditation on how leaders who hold false beliefs use religious rhetoric to lead their followers into violence. The novel’s protagonist, Masoud (Caner Cindoruk), stirs up panic about the perceived evil of the Bazaris and uses his people’s fears as a weapon. At the beginning of the film, the Bazarians from the city return to their land and aim to get work as village guards. The Hazerites, who had protected their lands in their absence, would not allow this. Enthusiastic locals, hungry for more land, government action, and control of their region, follow in Masoud’s footsteps. The Sufi religious leader promises “salvation” from the other side and directs his political messages through the interpretation of dreams: he claims to have prophetic visions intended to guide the future of the Hazratites. He says the moment has come to kill them all.

Alper’s film issues a chilling warning against powerful men around the world – from Erdogan to Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump – who use words as a weapon to unleash irrational fears against university professors, NGO workers, or the likes of George Soros. The consequences of such ideological programming are uncontrollable and risky.

Unlike the directors of these highly successful films, Güney faced imprisonment in Türkiye and died in exile in France. Alper, who still lives in Turkey, teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Istanbul Technical University, and has run Istanbul’s influential Cinematheque theater since 2021. Born in Berlin to Turkish immigrants, Catak spent his student years in Istanbul before returning to Germany, where he has made films since 2005. Their debt to Güney’s legacy is clear and enormous. Like the Kurdish masters of Turkish cinema, they are not afraid to break the silence.