This Oscar®-nominated knockout first feature from director Deniz Gamze Ergüven is a heady, emotional and deeply personal paean to female power.

Set in a remote Turkish coastal village, five young orphaned sisters are spotted harmlessly playing with boys at the beach. When this ‘scandalous’ behavior is reported to their grandmother and uncle, the pair begin a tyrannical regime of imprisonment. Panic and hysteria set in as the adults take draconian steps to safeguard their marriage prospects: the house becomes a veritable ‘wife factory’, all pop culture artifacts are removed, girly clothes replaced with drab brown dresses, before the eldest sisters are subjected to virginity tests and married off one by one.

Comparisons to Sofia Coppola’s dreamy The Virgin Suicides will be inevitable, but Mustang signals the arrival of a singular and fierce new female voice in cinema – this is a powerful portrait of sisterhood that cannot be ignored.

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