The Passengers (Yolcular) (translated)

Yolcular (The Passengers) is a 1979 Turkish feature film directed and written by Yavuz Pağda. Halil Ergün and Meral Orhonsay headline the cast, which also includes Necmettin Çobanoğlu. The film, shot in Turkish, opened in April 1979.

Beyond its screen content, the film is remembered chiefly for its place in one of the defining censorship clashes of Turkish cinema. When the state Censorship Board sought to excise portions of the picture and bar it from the 16th Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival — along with Ömer Kavur's Yusuf ile Kenan and Yavuz Özkan's Demiryol — the producers and directors of all the competing works pulled out in solidarity. The jury then unanimously declined to judge the feature competition, declaring it could not evaluate films it had not been allowed to see, and the festival administration, taking a stand against censorship, cancelled that year's edition altogether. Yolcular thus became an emblem of collective resistance to film censorship in Turkey.