Mustang (2015)

Director: Deniz Gamze Erguven
Stars: Gunes Sensoy, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Tugba Sunguroglu
Runtime: 97 minutes

Synopsis: When five orphan girls are seen innocently playing with boys on a beach, their scandalized conservative guardians confine them while forced marriages are arranged.

Verdict: Femicides and domestic violence cases have been on the rise in Turkey for the past few years, prompting women to take their demands to the streets lately to showcase the lenient methods adopted by the state to guarantee their safety in a country governed by a patriarchal system in which honor killings are unfortunately still of actuality. In fact, allow me to throw some statistics at you to better highlight how terrifying the situation is in the Middle Eastern country: 38% of Turkish women admitted to having been victims of domestic abuse at some point in their lives, while 34% of men declared that they believe in the necessity of the occasional beating of their partners. To add insult to injury, President Recep Erdoğan announced in 2014 that “a woman’s natural role is as a mother and argued that women are not equal to men” (quote taken from the NY Times article titled “Turkey Acquits 2 Men in Berlin ‘Honor Killing’ of Their Sister”). He even went as far as pulling out of the Istanbul Convention aimed at protecting women from violence only a few days ago, stating via the voice of his VP that “preserving [our] traditional social fabric will protect the dignity of Turkish women”.  Explaining these horrifying figures is certainly no easy task as it combines a broken system and outdated traditions, but one of the main reasons behind them has to do with the country’s normalization of arranged marriages, a union viewed as being a serious abuse of human rights in many parts of the world.

Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Oscar-nominated directorial debut “Mustang” takes a brave stance against everything I spoke of in the previous paragraph. It’s an impressively constructed film that follows five close orphan girls confined to their conservative guardians’ house after they are seen playing with male friends at a nearby beach. We witness them as they are slowly but surely being stripped from whatever ounce of freedom they still held. The only purpose they serve in the eyes of their elders is that of becoming a housewife, a fate they start training for under the supervision of their grandmother.

It’s a powerful and necessary watch that succeeds in boiling the audience’s blood by highlighting the consequences of these ethics on young women not only in Turkey but in the entire world. The bond shared by the five main characters is executed so organically that you cannot picture them separated and, despite a few moments that felt a little too dramatized (a scene involving a football game comes to mind) and a use of narration that never felt justified, I found the script to overall do justice to that topic by providing an honest depiction of what growing up as a young girl subjected to these bigoted beliefs amount to.

If there was ever an appropriate time to seek “Mustang” out, it would be now. The fight against any sort of injustice begins with a discussion about it, and I, for one, believe that this particular issue is not brought up nearly as frequently as it needs to be on the international scene. This film will most certainly ignite that conversation.

FINAL GRADE: 8/10