Mustang

On their way home from school one sunny day, five sisters living in rural northern Turkey engage in innocent play by a lake with a group of local boys. But what is a harmless game for them, their traditional grandma and uncle see as an unacceptable and immoral scandal that uncomfortably reveals their daughters’ emerging sexuality. The girls’ home immediately becomes a prison where, isolated from the outside world, they are raised to adopt the proper morals and traditional roles of women in Muslim society. Based on the director’s personal experience with a highly conservative view of women’s identity, the film is an unusually sensitive and empathetic look at the world of adolescent girls and the conflict between their desire to determine their own lives and the strongly authoritarian and traditionalist views of their elders. Her look at the delicate subject of women’s role in society, explored from a universally comprehensible perspective, is accompanied by the excellent music of Warren Ellis.