This book provides a critically informed account of the Turkey-born
France-based director Deniz Gamze Ergüven's debut film Mustang (2015),
which tells the story of five orphaned sisters living with their
grandmother and uncle in a remote Turkish village.
The film's familiar art-house style, and its universalising focus on
female coming-of-age and feminist dissent, resulted in celebratory
reviews from journalists and scholars of world cinema. Meanwhile,
Mustang's framing of youth in the Turkish national context, and its
representation of gender, divided Turkish film critics and cultural
theorists. These divisions led to a debate that questions the politics
of transnational feminism by criticising the film's failure to capture
the local intricacies of the politics of gender and youth. While this
book aims to locate Mustang within the intersection of emerging female
and youth narratives in the cinema of Turkey, it also provides a
critical understanding of the differences in Mustang's local and
global reception. This focus on the geopolitics of representation
informs the diverse criteria this study uses to evaluate Ergüven's
stylistic choices.
Engaging with both Anglophone and Turkish literature in youth cinema and
gender studies, the book makes an original contribution to current
debates on national/transnational cinemas and gender/youth studies and
is an accessible reference for graduate and undergraduate study of
contemporary film.
Elif Akçalı is Associate Professor in Film and TV Studies at Kadir Has
University, Turkey. Her research focuses on film aesthetics,
videographic criticism, non-fiction film, and gender/sexuality studies.
