Nominated for Best Foreign Film at the recent Oscars, actress and director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang is a heady, emotional and deeply personal story and a paean to female power.
It’s set at the start of summer in a village in northern Turkey, when Lale (the youngest sister, through whose innocent eyes the film is seen) and her four sisters are spotted playing with boys while at the beach; and the supposed debauchery of their games causes a scandal with unintended consequences.
Forbidden from leaving the house by their strict uncle and grandmother, they are forced to cook and do housework instead of going to school; then, their grandmother decides to start marrying them off. But the sisters – driven by the same insatiable desire and common understanding of their right to freedom – rebel in their own ways.
Telling a very particular, character-based story, Ergüven’s incendiary film is nonetheless a parable for the more widespread need for female education and independence; brilliantly acted by its affecting young cast.
