By Hannah Bonner

What does it mean to possess desire and passion when you’re a teenage girl living in a remote Turkish village, in a conservative family? Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven explores this question in her debut feature Mustang (2015), a sun streaked film that chronicles the story of five orphaned sisters being preened for marriage by their overbearing grandmother and abusive uncle. Though the girls don identical, ankle-length brown dresses and hear on the radio that, “women must be chaste and pure, know their limits, and mustn’t laugh openly in public or be provocative with every move,” each sister rebels in her own particular way, whether ripping a slit in her dress to her thigh, learning to drive on the sly, or sneaking out in the middle of the night to kiss the boy who spray paints her name down the length of the village’s dirt road. To want is to be human and to be adolescent, whether the hunger is for the apples in your neighbor’s orchard or the beautiful boy who catches your slippers as you climb down the drainpipe for a midnight rendezvous. Yet, for the sisters’ uncle and grandmother, chastity is paramount, and they’ll go to any and all lengths to ensure that each sister marries – and marries a virgin. The youngest sister, Lale’s (played by Günes Sensoy), desperation to escape the confines of domesticity is palpable, and she brings an electric energy to her feisty character. Ergüven often lingers on the girls’ auburn manes and long limbs, but never succumbs to sexualizing or exploiting the girls. The film, instead, hones in on their unbridled joy at watching a soccer game or pretending their mattress is a pool and the sheets, waves. Mustang is a film that seizes hold of your eyes, ears, and heart, where these girls, as poet Linda Gregg writes, “must live in the suffering and desire of what / rises and falls.”