Özgü Namal and Tansu Biçer in Ilker Çatak’s Gelbe Briefe/Yellow Letters
It didn’t take long for this year’s installation of the Berlin Film Festival to create its first media storm. When the members of the International Jury were presented on opening day, German journalist Tilo Jung, referring to the German government’s lack of solidarity with Palestine while supporting Ukraine’s war against Russia, wanted to hear the Jury’s opinion about this “selective treatment of human rights.” Jury president Wim Wenders insisted on separating politics and film, describing art as a counterweight to politics. “We have to do the work of people and not of politicians,” he said. Earlier in the same press conference, he had already explained that “movies can change the world. Not in a political way but through empathy.”1
Wenders’ remark about separating film and politics quickly went viral, while his elaborate contextualization was ignored. Acclaimed author Arundhati Roy withdrew from the festival, calling his comments unconscionable, “because it’s a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity.”2 In an open letter published in Variety, 81 filmmakers condemned the Berlinale’s censoring of the Israeli war in Gaza, among them Tilda Swinton who had received an honorary Golden Bear just last year.3 Two days after the jury press conference, Berlinale President Tricia Tuttle felt compelled to issue a statement on the festival’s website underscoring that there is no censorship at the Berlinale.4 “The Berlinale does not tell you what to say and what not to say,” German director Ilker Çatak added, “nobody tells you stay away from this topic.”5 Tuttle also could have cited her own practice from last year as an example of free speech, when she let the award-winning Swinton voice her support of the BDN (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement.
While I personally found Wenders’ remarks ill-advised, the point is that artists today often face a no-win situation when asked to comment on political situations. They will either be condemned for avoiding an answer or criticized for saying something that meets with disapproval by some group. What is worse, the soundbite-hungry internet rarely leaves room for differentiation, preferring catchphrases over careful evaluation. The larger problem for the Berlinale was that attention was drawn away from the films themselves. In this case, that attention was hijacked by Tilo Jung, a self-proclaimed influencer who measures his success in clicks, and who, to my knowledge, has never reviewed a film or conducted an interview with a filmmaker. Luckily, the films themselves soon took over the headlines (or at least for a while), providing a plethora of answers on how to think about aesthetics and politics.
A textbook illustration was Ilker Çatak’s Gelbe Briefe/Yellow Letters, the winner of the Golden Bear, a drama about a successful artist couple in Istanbul that crumbles under the pressure of an oppressive government. The title refers to the yellow letters which the government sends to perceived dissidents, informing them that they have been fired. Çatak’s follow-up to his academy-nominated Das Lehrerzimmer/The Teachers’ Lounge, which premiered at Berlinale in 2023, is a careful examination of how political harassment and punishment forces its victims into a life of difficult choices and social decline. Rather than dealing with these issues in the abstract, Yellow Letters zooms in on the domestic and micro level. The daughter’s music lessons are cut, her father Aziz (Tansu Biçer) has to drive a cab, and the whole family moves in with grandmother. When Aziz’ wife Derya (Özgü Namal) foregoes her theatrical career to make money in commercial television, the couple turn on each other. The film is set in Turkey but was filmed in Germany to protect cast and crew. As intertitles inform us, Hamburg plays Istanbul while Berlin performs Ankara. In a courtroom scene, we see the sign “Dem Deutschen Volke” (dedicated to the German people), which also adorns the Reichstag, a clear reference that what’s happening in Turkey today could be happening in Germany, or almost anywhere. While formally a somewhat conventional film, Yellow Letters draws its strength from its political urgency and its minute realism. In one scene, Aziz and Derya argue whether their experimental theater work, which he wrote and directed and she acted in, really had any political impact, picking up on the same question which Wenders addressed just a day earlier. Çatak’s riveting family drama is the first German film since 2006 to win the Golden Bear and rarely has a Berlin Jury decision been considered so deserving.
Sandra Hüller as the scared Rose in Markus Schleinzer’s historical drama
A standout performance by Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall; Zone of Interest) in a trousers role anchors Rose, a drama set during the Thirty Years’ War. It is written and directed by Austrian Markus Schleinzer, who first gained acclaim for casting the children in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) before turning to directing. His new film revolves around a mysterious man with a long scar in his face (Hüller), who arrives in a remote village and claims to be the heir of a long-abandoned farmstead. He has the papers to prove it, so the suspicious villagers accept the former soldier into their midst. It also helps that he has money to fix up the dilapidated farm and hire some farmhands. Furthermore, by killing a bear, he wins the villagers’ trust and admiration. When a community leader corners him to marry his oldest daughter, he accepts. Soon, the wife gets pregnant, and we realize that in this village more than one person has a secret to hide.
The black-and-white film opens with smoke rising from battle fields and bones bleaching, creating a bleak setting in which people barely carve out a living. A voiceover narration, provided by Marisa Growaldt, prepares us for what is to unfold: “The true and twisted tale of a deceiver of land and folk, who, defying her birth as a woman, comported herself as a man and committed many a wicked deed.” Despite this somber warning, Rose is a surprisingly funny film about an impostor whose scars are both an essential disguise and a testimony to the toll she had to pay to make the role convincing. After being found out, she is interrogated by the authorities why she deceived the villagers; dryly she replies, “because there is freedom in trousers.” Rose shows that power is tied to the land and to the penis, and that pretending to have the latter can lead to the acquisition of the former. The 17th century did not look kindly upon such breaking of the rules. The last third of the film recalls Carl Theodor Dreyer’s fable The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), as Schleinzer, like Dreyer before him, depicts Rose’s fate with austerity and compassion. Sandra Hüller received a richly deserved Silver Bear for best leading performance, her second after winning for Requiem (Hans-Christian Schmid) in 2006.
Two very different historical periods are revisited in a pair of impressive South American films. Both focus on the precise historical moments when dictatorship won over democracy. The Chilean film, Hangar Rojo/Red Hangar, the first feature by Juan Pablo Sallato, is set on the eve of September 11, 1973, when a military coup deposed President Salvador Allende. At its center is Captain Jorge Silva (Nicolás Zárate), a former head of Air Force Intelligence who is now training cadets at a Santiago air base. When the film begins, we see him impatiently instructing a gauche new sergeant, Hernández. Things become more intense when an unannounced truck carrying unidentified cargo arrives at the base and Silva reluctantly allows it in. Clearly, something is afoot.
Captain Silva (Nicolás Zárate) and Sergeant Hernández (Aron Hernández) in Red Hangar
The taut black-and-white film will cover the following 24 hours, one of the most ignominious events in Latin American history, compressed into a pressure cooker drama that unfolds over some eighty minutes. At the center is Zárate’s magnificent performance that shows Silva as elusive, hard-to-read leader who struggles with his duty to obey (illegal) orders and his own conscience. While there have been numerous films about the military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, Sallato’s film provides a fresh angle by making us witness the events through the eyes of a high-ranking military. A signature shot repeatedly shows us the back of Silva’s head, as if he were in the crosshairs of a rifle. We see what he sees but are not privy to his thoughts. The limited range of Silva’s mostly well-guarded emotions unfolds through his interactions with Hernández, with whom he slowly builds trust; his tender but not entirely honest moments with his wife, Rosa, a history teacher; and his poker-face demeanor vis-à-vis his superior, the hardline Colonel Jahn, with whom he shares a past that is slowly revealed. In these exchanges, more important than what is said is what is self-understood and what doesn’t need to be said. The script was written by Luis Emilio Guzmán, and it is based on Fernando Villagran’s eye-witness account and extensive research into the military’s role in the coup, and who appears as a younger version of himself in the film. Red Hangar’s central question (when does it become immoral to obey orders?) certainly resonates with the world today.
If Red Hangar gains its force through its carefully contained focus and almost abstract, noir-like images, Narciso, by Marcelo Martinessi, brims with music, color and theatricality. Its setting is a radio theater in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción, in late August 1959, where an aspiring singer with the stage name Narciso (Diro Romero) finds work and companionship. Having just returned to his provincial homeland from the far more worldly Buenos Aires, Narciso has brought with him a love for American Rock ‘n’ Roll, an emblem of modernity that clashes with the theater’s favoring of Paraguayan folklore. As is slowly revealed, the theater operated by Lulú (Manuel Cuenca) is a safe haven for the gay community who have learned to strike a careful balance between what is allowed and what is not—a balance the flamboyant Narciso threatens to upset.
In his last Berlinale entry, Las Herederas/The Heiresses, which won two Silver Bears in 2018, Martinessi focused on ageing women; here, he again turns his lens towards another underrepresented subject, the fragile masculinities of repressed queer people. The various men we meet share the need to hide their desire, but how they handle the necessary camouflage differs significantly. Young Narciso openly enjoys the attention he gets from both men and women, while the older Lulú, because of his official status and possibly also his conservative wife, has to cruise the streets in the depth of night. An interesting figure is US ambassador Wesson (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) whose privileged status gives him sexual and political liberties other do not have. Just like Rock ‘n’ Roll, this outsider is eyed with suspicion, but like the music of Bill Haley and Elvis, he also stands for freedom and progress. He is not afraid to demonstrate that he knows more about the country than those who live there. The water purification system that he inaugurates is not the first in South America, as the government wants its citizens to believe; in reality, Wesson explains, Paraguay is finally catching up with its neighbors.
Much of the film is set within Lulú’s radio theater, making its stage a symbol of the clash between sanctioned and ‘degenerate’ culture. While pushing the boundaries with American music, the theater’s mainstay is folklore and the news, enjoyed by a small live audience and numerous listeners all over the country. The most striking show in its repertoire is a dramatic reading of Stam Broker’s novel Dracula, replete with music and strange sound effects. As the world around the theater group grows darker, so does its performance of this radio play.
The actors at the Radio Theater performing “Dracula” in Narciso.
The film is earmarked at both ends by Narciso announcing his last appearance at the radio theater. In an extensive flashback, the film then recounts the events leading up to his murder. The figure of Narciso is based on Bernardo Aranda who was killed on September 1, 1959. By that time, authoritarian ruler Alfredo Stroessner had already been five years in power, but it was this event that allowed him to fully consolidate his position. Stroessner put the blame for the crime on homosexuals and quickly rounded up 108 suspects, whose search warrants were read out aloud from the radio theater, a task performed in the film by Lulú’s wife, not without a certain glee. This round-up was not an isolated act of repression. New rules and mechanisms were applied repeatedly, whenever a new minority threatened Stroessner’s power, extending his reign to 1989, thereby making it the longest-lasting dictatorship in Latin America.
What makes the Berlinale unique is that it is a festival for the public who have the chance to meet the filmmakers presenting their latest work. After the premiere of Narciso, actor Manuel Cuenca, who plays Lulú in the film, explained to the audience that he was three years old when Aranda was murdered and that, because of his own homosexuality, he was in prison during the 1980s. It soon became clear in the Q&A that most of the cast, many of whom are highly recognized stage actors at home, identify as queer. A Paraguayan journalist in attendance then shared that at the request of the Paraguayan government the US had to recently recall its ambassador, an openly gay man who had been living in Asunción with his husband. As William Faulkner knew, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
A festival favorite of mine was the documentary Bucks Harbor by Peter Muller, which follows the lives of four men in the remote fishing community on the Northeast Atlantic that gives the film its name. “If Bangor, Maine is the asshole of the world, we’re 200 miles up it.” This is how one of them, Mike, describes his hometown. With his wife, Mike is raising two boys, Carter and Ryan, and he tries to be a good role model for them, training them how to catch lobster and shoot game. Indeed, all the men who call Bucks Harbor home carve out a living off the sea and the surroundings forests. Wayne is a loner with four ex-wives and allegedly “1600 former girlfriends,” who suffered the abuse of his father and became a rebel. After repeatedly doing time in jail, he has finally quit drinking. Dave, in contrast, is a quick mind with a clear artistic talent, whose dreams of art school were beyond his family’s means, or imagination. He became an addict, because he couldn’t handle the stress and pain of work, and working hours dictated by the tides didn’t leave room for a serious relationship. Little has changed in the roughly 250 years since this community was chartered. Muller’s nature photography captures the rugged beauty of the landscape without romanticizing it. As the stories of the four men reveal, career choices were limited—you basically became what your father did before you. Toxic masculinities are unavoidable in a place suffering from financial precarity and institutional neglect.
Carter and Mike on their boat in Pete Muller’s Bucks Harbor.
Yet while Bucks Harbor seems like a men’s world, Fuller also spends time with the women who keep the place running and who work as hard as the men, and sometimes harder. Some of them have given up on men entirely, for reasons that are perfectly clear—they cannot be relied on when it matters, women have to clean up the mess men made, and women are expected to be there when men relapse. Some women revel in their independence. “We need men only for babies… maybe.”
A quiet counterpoint to the harsh life at the open ocean is the deep-sea photography of lobsters that punctuates the film. The images of these crustaceans shedding their outer shells serve as metaphor for the vulnerable interiority of the gruff-looking men. As we get to know Dave and Wayne better, new sides of them emerge. Dave gets inducted as harbor master and visibly enjoys the respect of the community, even though the pay raise is negligible. Family man Mark, who works the counter of a tackle shop just like his father had done before him, has an altogether different side to him that takes place exclusively online (and which cannot be revealed here). Bucks Harbor is not a documentary as Fred Wiseman would have made it, with an analytic focus on institutions and the people who make them work; nor is it a nature documentary that highlights the rugged beauty of an isolated community, with some feel-good stories thrown in. Instead, by shining the light onto four excentric characters, Muller reveals their individuality and humanity. As we learn late in the film, the community’s adversity to change may face its greatest challenge yet. As ocean temperatures are rising, the lobsters are moving into deeper waters.
If the Berlinale’s opening press conference had begun with a bang, the awards ceremony that concluded the festival was equally astounding. Preceding the celebration of the winners, Tricia Tuttle took to the podium to speak about the last ten days. “This Berlinale has taken place in a world that feels raw and fractured,” she opened, before praising the diversity of voices that were heard during the event, including those levying criticism at her and her organization. “Free expression at the Berlinale is not one voice,” she added. “It is many voices. Sometimes calm. Sometimes angry. Sometimes it looks silent, but it is speaking through cinema. These voices can be contradictory. A festival does not resolve the world’s conflicts. But it can make space for complexity, listening, and humanizing each other.” If Tuttle felt shaken by what occurred after the opening day, so did Wim Wenders. “We walked through a storm,” he noted. Before he announced the winners, Wenders thanked Berlinale president Tricia Tuttle. He had good reasons to be grateful to Tuttle, but so can the whole Berlinale. Already well respected after her first festival last year, Berliners have fully embraced her now, because she is courageous, outspoken, and firm in her conviction.
Of course, this being the Berlinale, there was more political drama. The Perspectives Award, for a first-time director, was given to Chronicles from the Siege, a film made up of interconnected vignettes about trying to survive in an unnamed country under serious duress. Shot in Jordan and Algeria, director Abdallah Alkhatib here draws on his own experience in the Yarmouk refugee camp for Palestinians in Damascus during the Syrian Civil War. When Alkhatib accepted the Silver Bear, he wore a keffiyeh while his producer, Taqiyeddine Issaad, held a up a Palestine flag. “We will remember everyone who has been on our side,” the director admonished the audience, “and we will remember everyone who was against us.” At this point, the German Minister of the Environment, Carsten Schneider, left the room in protest. Germany’s center and right-wing press swiftly claimed that this was proof that the Berlinale was (again!) out of control. Then, four days after the festival wrapped, Tricia Tuttle was called in by Minister of State of Culture and Media, Wolfram Weimer. Many feared that she would become the recipient of a yellow letter. Yet a strong show of national and international solidarity of filmmakers and artists ultimately convinced Weimer that firing Tuttle would do irreparable harm to the Berlinale, and ultimately also his own position. Tricia Tuttle certainly can claim victory now, and so can all who believe in free speech and independent film and media.
Notes
- The entire press conference can be seen here: https://www.berlinale.de/en/photos-videos/videos/vod.html/s=%22%20international%20jury%20%22/o=desc/p=1/rp=40?l=275218 ⮭
- Nadia Khomami, “Arundhati Roy Quits Berlin Film Festival After ‘Stay out of Politics’ comment.” The Guardian February 13, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/13/arundhati-roy-quits-berlin-film-festival-over-stay-out-of-politics-comment. Accessed February 17, 2026. ⮭
- William Earl, “Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton Among 81 Names to Sign Open Letter Criticizing Berlin Film Festival for ‘Silence’ on Gaza,” Variety, February 17, 2026. https://variety.com/2026/film/global/javier-bardem-tilda-swinton-letter-berlinale-gaza-silence-1236665382/. Accessed February 18, 2026. ⮭
- Tricia Tuttle, “On Speaking, Politics and Cinema,” February 14, 2026. https://www.berlinale.de/en/news-topics/berlinale-notes.html. Accessed February 15, 2026. ⮭
- Ilker Çatak cited in: Kathleen Hildebrand and David Steinitz, “Herrschen ‘Zensur’ und ‘Paranoia’ beim Thema Gaza auf der Berlinale?” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, February 19, 2026. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/berlinale-gaza-brief-kritik-javier-bardem-tilda-swinton-li.3389451. Accessed February 19, 2026. ⮭