Berlinale awards Golden Bear to Yellow Letters

Berlin’s film industry just handed its top prize to a movie warning about “creeping authoritarianism,” while spending the festival itself in a political brawl over Gaza. The Berlinale is publicly funded and therefore gets to stage its moral theater on someone else’s tab.

At the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, the Golden Bear went to Yellow Letters, a Turkish-language drama by German director İlker Çatak, according to The Guardian, France 24 and Euronews. The film follows two prominent figures in Ankara’s theatre scene whose marriage fractures after they lose their jobs for falling out of political favor. The title refers to the yellow official dismissal notices—bureaucratic stationery as a plot device, and as a reminder that repression rarely arrives with jackboots first.

Jury president Wim Wenders said the film gave the jury “chills” with its warning signs of despotism and repression that “could possibly happen in our countries,” The Guardian reports. The production was shot in Germany—Berlin standing in for Ankara, Hamburg for Istanbul—explicitly framed as “universal,” per the same report.

The rest of the awards list reads like a carefully curated syllabus. The Silver Bear for best director went to Grant Gee for Everybody Digs Bill Evans, a black-and-white feature about the jazz pianist’s struggles with addiction, while Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea, a dementia drama starring Juliette Binoche, picked up jury recognition and acting prizes, according to The Guardian. Euronews and France 24 likewise highlight the festival’s emphasis on intimate suffering and social constraint—safe, legible subjects for institutions that trade in moral status.

Yet the Berlinale’s own political environment undercut its self-image. The Guardian notes the 10-day event was “overshadowed by a row over politics in cinema,” tied to Gaza. Wenders himself faced criticism at the opening over comments about movies and activism. The festival celebrates a film about state-driven professional purges while simultaneously litigating which political commitments are acceptable inside its own gates.

Cultural bodies can become mini-states. With public funding and political prestige, they develop their own soft enforcement mechanisms—signaling, denunciation, gatekeeping—while awarding art that condemns exactly those dynamics when practiced by governments they dislike.

Yellow Letters may well be a strong film. But the Berlinale’s real achievement is more meta: turning a warning about authoritarian drift into a trophy—while demonstrating, in real time, how quickly a subsidized institution learns to confuse virtue with compliance.