“Yellow Letters,” a searing political drama by the German director Ilker Catak, won the top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
The sobering feature centers on a theater actress and an academic facing political repression in contemporary Turkey. Stripped of their livelihoods because of their views, they confront a series of increasingly loaded choices as they try to support themselves and their daughter.
Shot entirely in Germany, the film is also notable for its experimental approach to setting, using an undisguised Berlin as a stand-in for Ankara, the Turkish capital, and Hamburg, Germany, as Istanbul. Catak’s previous film, “The Teachers’ Lounge,” was nominated for the Oscar for best international feature in 2024.
Wim Wenders, the German director who led the jury at this year’s festival, praised “Yellow Letters” for speaking up “very clearly about the language of totalitarianism,” describing it in his remarks introducing the award, known as the Golden Bear, as a “terrifying premonition and look into the near future that could possibly happen in our countries as well.”
This year’s jury also included the South Korean actress Bae Doona, the American filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green and a Polish producer of “The Zone of Interest,” Ewa Puszczynska.
The Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, or the runner-up award, was given to “Salvation,” a propulsive, visually striking thriller about a community in rural Turkey embroiled in a longstanding feud with a neighboring village. The film was inspired by a real-life massacre in Mardin, Turkey, in 2009.
The film’s director, Emin Alper, spoke out in his speech for political prisoners in Turkey, including the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, who has been imprisoned since last year under what many critics see as politically motivated charges of corruption.
The jury prize was awarded to “Queen at Sea,” the American director Lance Hammer’s wrenching portrait of a husband and wife navigating the wife’s advanced dementia. The two actors playing the couple, Anna Calder-Marshall and Tom Courtenay, shared the gender-neutral award for best supporting performance. In his speech, Hammer thanked Juliette Binoche, who plays the woman’s daughter.
The best director award went to the British filmmaker Grant Gee for “Everybody Digs Bill Evans,” an experimental, intimate movie starring the Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie (“The Worst Person in the World”) as Evans, a jazz pianist.
The best performance award went to Sandra Hüller for “Rose,” one of the most critically praised films of the festival, in which she plays a woman who passes for a man and marries a neighbor’s daughter in a farming community in 17th-century Germany. The sparse, black-and-white film is an understated showcase for Hüller, who worked under facial prosthetics.
The award for best screenplay went to Geneviève Dulude-de Celles for “Nina Roza,” about an art dealer who travels from Canada to Bulgaria to track down a young prodigy. The prize for special artistic achievement was handed to “Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird),” a formally adventurous documentary from the United States exploring a woman’s grief for a close friend.
This edition of the Berlinale, as the festival is known, was the second under the leadership of Tricia Tuttle, the former director of the London Film Festival. The largest film festival in the world by audience, it opened last Thursday with a gala honoring the actress Michelle Yeoh with an Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement and a screening of “No Good Men,” a warmly received romantic comedy by the Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat.
Much of the news media coverage of this year’s festival was shaped by viral political moments, after journalists at several news conferences confronted attendees with pointed questions about topics such as Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the rise of the far right. The episodes led Tuttle to issue a lengthy statement calling for a more respectful tone.
More than 80 former or current Berlinale participants, including Tilda Swinton and Mark Ruffalo, signed an open letter demanding that the festival condemn Israel over its actions in Gaza and asserting that the festival had censored artists on the subject. Tuttle rebutted that allegation in an interview with The New York Times, saying it was untrue.
Several presenters and winners addressed the controversy during the awards gala, including by speaking out in support of Palestinians. Tuttle said from the stage that it was “good” that the festival had been “publicly challenged” and that “criticism and speaking up is part of democracy.”
At times, that coverage threatened to drown out discussion of the festival’s program, which included nearly 300 films and had been largely well-received, even if it lacked the star power of previous editions.
Writing in The New York Times, the critic Beatrice Loayza argued that the festival’s selections this year showed a strong willingness by organizers to engage with thorny geopolitical themes. A section devoted to feature film debuts, which Tuttle created last year, “hit its stride” at this year’s event, Loayza said.
A critic for The Hollywood Reporter called the festival “one of the strongest Berlins in years.” And while Katja Nicodemus, a critic at Die Zeit, had a more mixed verdict on the competition films, she noted that it was a good year for German-language entries, including “Rose” and Angela Schanelec’s “My Wife Cries,” an elliptical drama about a splintering relationship.
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