Over the past decade, Emin Alper has established himself as one of contemporary Turkish cinema’s most incisive observers of politics, power, and the dangerous dynamics of populism. With Salvation, he returns to the Berlinale with an atmospheric competition entry examining a society on edge, crafting a story that is equally intimate and allegorical. A remote community in the Anatolian mountains becomes the enigmatic setting of an escalating conflict fueled by pathological paranoia and religious delusion. In conversation at the 76th Berlinale, the Turkish director reflects on the story’s universal meaning, the perilous charisma of unstable leaders, and the anxieties that drive people to succumb to inhumane cruelties.