Mustang

One’s appreciation for Mustang will depend on one mileage for film’s that wear their political messages on their sleeves, unapologetically so, tossing nuance into the garbage bin at the earliest opportunity. In fairness, while the film is not a documentary (although some of it is inspired by Ergüven’s life as a child), the events depicted do happen in the real world all around us, all the time.

There’s a certain joy to be felt when discovering a new voice in film. Taking the risk to sit down in and watch a director’s first feature, witnessing how they grapple and contend with cinema. Each year, there are great debuts, to be sure, but in 2015, it seemed to me to be unusually strong …