İlker Çatak is the very best thing to have happened to FRG cinema in recent times. That he’s also mighty successful, though, feels a bit unexpected, as his art is not of the kind celebrated widely these days – in fact, with his aesthetic classicism based on modesty verging on self-effacement, Çatak feels like a blast from the past in a culture of ego trips masquerading as originality and talking points as intellectual depth.
Which does not mean that Çatak’s works lack style, far from it. Actually, each of his films sports a somewhat different artistic approach ranging from the strong colours and unpredictable rhythm of his already masterful fiction feature debut, Once upon a time… Indianerland (2017), via the serene sequence shots in Stambul Garden (2021) to the Brechtian grounding of his latest, Yellow Letters (2026). What unites these three with the rest of his feature œuvre: I Was, I Am, I Will Be (2019), The Teachers’ Lounge (2023), and the teleplay Borowski und der gute Mensch (2021), an episode of the TV series Tatort, is an extraordinary sense of narrative economy, a refusal to accept any kind of anecdotal ballast that distracts from the stories’ respective cores – a clear understanding of what makes ideas graspable. Which is to say that he walks the finest of lines: between creating intricately wrought scenes that feel relatable, like something you’ve experienced yourself or can imagine finding yourself in, while always and above all serving the narrative – what Çatak wants to say.
It’s telling that Once upon a time… Indianerland has zilch to do with the Turkish-German experience – as if Çatak wanted to say: Don’t even try to put me into that box. Some of his following films would, though, and always from a different angle that tends to highlight the complicated relationships between heritages and histories partly entwined and partly separate, often contradictory, never adding up, with losses and wins of unexpected natures. And always, always pointing towards wider contexts: While I Was, I Am, I Will Be might be one of the most sociopsychologically complex going movingly enigmatic love stories between different cultures and classes, Yellow Letters became an urgent reminder of authoritarianism’s structures and workings – everywhere.
A reflection of a life negotiating cultures? Why not, as well? Born in Berlin (West) in 1984 to a working class family, Çatak spent several years in Istanbul from age twelve on, to return to the FRG for his studies after finishing high school in Turkey. Despite his parents’ worries about the sustainability of a life in the art world (feelings probably all of us working class children who took that road know), Çatak found his way into this sphere by directing first shorts then also commercials while studying at film schools devoid of elite airs. Which is to say: Çatak made it with good doses of character, determination and grit, but above all huge amounts of vision – something that convinced people.
And that something is his sense of cinema as a collective meeting space where experiences get shared and put up for negotiation. Which makes The Teachers’ Lounge, with its school turned into a political pressure cooker, almost an allegory of his idea of cinema and its place in culture – or at least the place it once had and should still have.
Olaf Möller