Mustang for the win!!!

Mustang is one of the “Best Foreign Language Film” nominees this year in Academy Awards. Despite being a nominee for France, Mustang is directed by a Turkish woman who grew up in France and tells the story of a group of Turkish girls (sisters) from a conservative village at Turkey’s Black Sea coast. Whenever a Turkish film gets this much support from a European country, a non-negligible group of Turkish people always tend to say “They support this film since it shows Turkey as a bad country”. Mustang had its fair-share of such comments. I think these people instead should thank France for supporting this really well-done Turkish film.   

Almost three days passed since I watched Mustang and I feel like it is probably the Turkish film I liked the most since Ozcan Alper’s Autumn (and before that there was Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven – well, I know all of these films have a Black Sea connection, but it is not the entire reason :P). I am aware that Mustang isn't as good as the other two films I mentioned here. In fact, it has a lot of mistakes trying to fit too many events in one movie (as many first-time film directors tend to do). However, the pieces of this film will stay with me longer. What I liked the most about Mustang was that despite having an extremely tragic topic at hand and the possibility of turning into an extremely depressing film, its tone was light, funny, and hopeful without being insensitive. In other words, since the issues of women in conservative regions is a sensitive topic for me personally, this could easily have been a film that feels like thousand knife twists in my stomach. My stomach stayed fine both during the film and afterward.

I come from a small city at the Black Sea coast that was mostly full of leftist people back when I was a kid, and I was raised by two feminists. In fact, in our nuclear family, my dad would be the one to hold the crown for “toughest feminist bitch in the family”. Therefore, I never had to face the kind of pressure the girls in Mustang had to go through. However, I also grew up being aware of the fact that I lived in a mostly conservative society and I sometimes felt freer at my parent’s house than I felt outside. Plus, both my mom and my grandmother come from a conservative Black Sea coast village in Turkey; so I can assure you that nothing in Mustang is exaggeration. The only problem I had with Mustang was that despite the story taking place in the Black Sea coast, there wasn’t a single drop of rain during the entire film. This is not very realistic. :)

I know that Son of Saul is kind of a front-runner for the awards season in the category of “Foreign Language Films”, but I really really want Mustang to win the Oscar.