Mustang

Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Mustang opened in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2015. Its awards run took in an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, as France's official submission, and the César for Best First Film. It was the debut feature of a French-Turkish director who arrived with a voice unlike anyone else's in her generation, and she co-wrote the screenplay with Alice Winocour.

Five orphaned sisters, Lale, Nur, Ece, Selma and Sonay, live with their grandmother and uncle in a village on the Turkish Black Sea coast. On the last day of school they are seen playing with boys in the sea (chicken-fights, splashing each other in their school-uniform skirts), and the elders read this harmless afternoon as a threat to the family's honour. The girls are confined to the house. The film follows the months of that confinement and their efforts to hold on to their friendship, and to themselves, as the family tightens its control.

It works as a coming-of-age drama and as a hard look at what options a young woman in contemporary Turkey actually has inside a traditional rural family. The five lead performances carry it, Güneş Şensoy's Lale above all. David Chizallet and Ersin Gök shot the real Black Sea village and the interiors of the family house, and the look they gave the film is one later Turkish-language cinema has kept returning to.