Mustang

Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Mustang opened at Cannes Directors' Fortnight in 2015 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film as France's official Oscar submission, alongside the César for Best First Film. The film consolidated Ergüven, a French-Turkish director making her debut feature, as one of the most distinctive new directorial voices of her generation. The screenplay was co-written by Ergüven with Alice Winocour.

Five orphan sisters — Lale, Nur, Ece, Selma and Sonay — live with their grandmother and uncle in a small Turkish-Black-Sea-coastal village. After being seen playing innocently with boys on the last day of school — chicken-fights in the sea, splashing each other in their school-uniform skirts — the girls are progressively confined to the family home, with the family elders interpreting the playful incident as a moral threat to family honour. The film follows the months of the girls' confinement and their continuing attempts to maintain their friendship and identities under the family's tightening control.

The film operates simultaneously as coming-of-age drama, contemporary Turkish-cultural document, and meditation on what young women's actual options are within a traditional rural family environment. The five lead performances — particularly Güneş Şensoy as the youngest sister Lale — anchor the film's continuing emotional register. David Chizallet and Ersin Gök's photography of the actual Black-Sea-coast village and the family-house interiors produced a distinctive visual register that has continued to be cited in subsequent Turkish-language cinema.