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Mustang (2015), director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film, premiered at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in 2015. The film has won numerous awards, including Foreign Language Film of the Year at the Academy Awards, Best Film Not in the English Language at the BAFTA Awards, and the Audience Award at the Glasgow Film Festival.
“Everything changed in the blink of an eye. One minute we were quiet. The next we all danced.”
The girls are orphaned and are raised by their stern grandmother and authoritarian uncle, who are more concerned with preserving the family's honor than with granting the children their fundamental rights and independence. One day, after school, the girls play innocently with some boys by the lake, never understanding the implications of such innocent behavior. When their grandma learns about this, the girls are compelled to remain in their home and are no longer permitted to leave at their own will, much alone attend to school.The girls, who are effectively prisoners in their own house, refuse to stay passive and create a plot to escape. Meanwhile, their grandma is arranging their marriages, and they are being married off one by one. Lale, the youngest of the five sisters, then realizes that she must go or share her sisters' fate.
The story of the five girls seems straightforward on the surface, but it's really a story of five girls who defy traditional notions of what it means to be a woman. Their grandmother tries to bring the ‘deviant’ behaviour of the girls back to normality, or what their culture deems as ‘normal’ by forcing them to wear conservative dresses and restrict their contact with the opposite sex, but the girls eventually rebel and experience a tragedy in their coming-of-age. The film does this all by simultaneously tackling important issues such as resistance, womanhood, sisterhood, and the objectification and undermining of young girls.
Although there was no major controversy surrounding the film following its premiere, the reception to Mustang in Turkey was polarized. While some critics, such as Atilla Dorsay, liked the film, it was condemned for erroneous or orientalist depictions of Turkish culture. Many critics, likened the movie to The Virgin Suicides, claiming that film was unoriginal and complimenting the directing and acting while criticizing the narrative as redundant.
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