Mustang

A Directors’ Fortnight award winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and the French entry for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2016 Academy Awards, Mustang captures the beginning of summer in a village in northern Turkey. Lale and her four sisters have returned home from school, innocently playing with boys—but the alleged debauchery of their games causes a local scandal with unintended consequences. The family’s home slowly becomes a prison, as classes on cooking and housekeeping replace regular schoolwork, and marriages begin to be arranged. The five sisters, driven by the same desire for freedom, fight back against the limits imposed on them. A moving story of emancipation, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s feature debut is a powerful, feminist indictment of social conservatism in contemporary Turkey, assuredly handled with vigor and sophistication. A Cohen Media Group release.