The Bus

Nine people are brought to Sweden on a bus belonging to a man named Ahmet. They have handed Ahmet their money and their passports for the journey. The bus is parked in a square in Stockholm, Ahmet gets off, and he never comes back. The people inside do not leave the bus for days; they are in the middle of a city whose language they do not speak and where they know no one. In the end they have to come out, and they are lost one by one. Tunç Okan shot the film in Sweden with a cast that is almost entirely non-professional; Tuncel Kurtiz also appears. The telling keeps dialogue to a minimum, because the characters cannot speak to anyone anyway. That silence is the film's greatest strength. The production ran into the censor in Turkey and could only be released by a court decision. Okan won the first-film prize at the Taormina festival in 1976. It is counted the harshest of the migration films of the seventies and is a cult film now.