ONCE UPON A TIME… MUSTANG

Protagonists : 

• Deniz ERGÜVEN, Director
• Charles GILLIBERT, Producer
• İlayda AKDOĞAN, actress
• Doğa DOĞUŞLU actress
• Güneş ŞENSOY, actress
• Elit İŞCAN, actress
• Tuğba SUNGUROĞLU, actress
• Nihal KOLDAŞ, actress
• Gaye PETEK, sociologist
• Suzanne MARROT, actress coach
• Edouard WAINTROP, Director of the Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes

In a village in today’s rural Turkey, five sisters rebel against their family and an oppressive patriarchal order. The Franco-Turkish filmmaker Deniz Gamze Ergüven directed his debut film Mustang in the aftermath of the 2013 events in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. A sensation at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 and selected to represent France the following year at the Hollywood Oscars, this impetuous film is particularly topical at a time when the Turkish regime is becoming tougher and Turkish women are victims of retrograde attacks from the religious and conservative authorities. Amine Mestari’s documentary film, the 44th in the collection “A Film and its Era” created by Marie Genin and Serge July, recounts the history of this film, its partly autobiographical character, and through it, the growing tensions between tradition and modernity, between East and West, between secularism and religiosity, between city and countryside, which characterize Turkey’s contemporary society.