FIRST OFF . . .

A censorship dispute may force the withdrawal of five of 160 films due to be screened at Istanbul’s seventh annual film festival next week, organizers said Sunday in the Turkish city. Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Betty Blue” and “Yakaris” by Soviet director Tengiz Abuladze are among five works that government inspectors want to cut or block, they said. “Yakaris” was being blocked on the grounds that it is anti-Islamic, and cuts from the other four films were demanded because of erotic scenes, program director Vecdi Sayar said. “We will either show films as a whole or not at all, both on principle and for technical reasons,” Sayar said. Government censors order films cut to preserve Turkey’s conservative family morality, even if the cuts sometimes render plots incomprehensible. Films banned for political reasons include those of the famous late Turkish director Yilmaz Guney, none of whose works of social protest can be shown. The two-week film festival starts next Monday with Woody Allen’s “Radio Days.”