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MUSTANG on the fifth day of the Festival

MUSTANG was screened at the National Theatre, on the fifth day of the 21st Sarajevo Film Festival. MUSTANG is a feature film by Deniz Gamze Ergüven in competition as part of our Competition Programme - Features.

It’s the beginning of the summer. In a village in the north of Turkey, Lale and her four sisters come home from school, innocently playing with boys. The supposed debauchery of their games causes a scandal with unintended consequences. The family home slowly turns into a prison, classes on housework and cooking replace school, and marriages begin to be arranged. The five sisters, driven by the same desire for freedom, fight back against the limits imposed on them.

Born in Ankara in 1978, Deniz Gamze Ergüven had a very cosmopolitan upbringing, between France, Turkey and the United States. She studied directing at La Fémis in Paris, after a BA in literature and an MA in African History at Johannesburg. Her graduation film, Bir Damla Su (Une goutte d'eau), screened at the Cannes Festival Cinéfondation and won a Leopards of Tomorrow award at the Locarno Festival. The 19-minute short tells the story of a young Turkish woman (played by Deniz herself) rebelling against the patriarchal attitudes and authoritarianism of the men in her community. After graduating from La Fémis, Denis Gamze Ergüven developed a debut feature set in South Central, Los Angeles, during the 1992 riots. Titled Kings, the project was selected by the Cinéfondation Workshop and Sundance Screenwriters Lab. it was set to one side in favor of MUSTANG, co-written with Alice Winocour in the summer of 2012. The story of an emancipation, MUSTANG is a powerful, female take on contemporary Turkey.

The screening took place at 20:00.