The Exiles: Ilker Çatak Travels to Turkish Backdrop for New Project “Yellow Letters”

Striking while the iron is hot, multi Berlinale prize-winning filmmaker Ilker Çatak will be moving on to his next project later this year with a drama titled Yellow Letters. Screen Daily reports that locations in Hamburg, Berlin and most likely Turkey will be included in the project set for an autumn shoot. Haut et Court folks come onto the project as co-producers and the film will see Çatak reteam with if…Productions’ Ingo Fliess and his cinematographer Judith Kaufman. The Teachers’ Lounge played like gangbusters at the Berlinale.

Based on Çatak’s own screenplay (with contributions from Ayda Çatak and Enis Köstepen), Yellow Letters tells the story of an artist couple in Turkey who lose their jobs overnight due to arbitrary state action and start to live in exile. Together with their growing daughter, they fight for a life of dignity and for their ideals as artists and parents.

In our review for The Teachers’ Lounge (which was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics), our Nicholas Bell called it

“a contemporary portrait of how a catch-22 situation decimates the ability for a well-intentioned teacher’s ability to do the right thing, it’s also a sly portrait of displacement, navigating the experience of adhering to a host culture as an outsider.”

Worth noting Yellow Letters is supported in Germany by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media (BKM) and in project development by MOIN Film Fund Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein and the German-Turkish Coproduction Development Fund.