Translating Girlhood in Mustang (2015): Locations of Style, Political Context and Audience Reception

As part of the conference "Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television", which took place at Istanbul Bilgi University (April 11-13, 2018),  Cüneyt Çakırlar presented his paper in the panel "Translating Girlhood in Mustang (2015)" with Özlem Güçlü (MMGSU) and Elif Akçalı (Kadir Has University). 

Focusing on the Turkey-born French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film Mustang (2015), the panel explored diverse modes of critical analysis to locate the film’s national and transnational framings of gender politics. Mustang tells the story of five orphaned sisters living with their grandmother and uncle in a remote Turkish village. Focusing on these five characters’ rapport with the conservative and segregated gender order in which these girls are “trained for” and forced into arranged marriages, this unconventional coming-of-age story capitalises upon solidarity, agency and resistance rather than a defeatist drama of spectacular victimhood. However, the film has received differing reviews: while the international reviews were celebrating it as a feminist text of rebellion and female empowerment, the local (i.e. Turkey-based) reviews were more sceptical of the film’s engagement with the national political context. The panel questioned the functions of film style, the political context of cinema, and audience reception in locating Mustang’s ideological operations in terms of national politics, (trans)national feminism, and the theoretical frameworks of national/transnational cinemas. Özlem Güçlü argued that Mustang’s formulation of female agency and subjectivity can be considered as exemplary of new female narratives in the contemporary cinema of Turkey. Cüneyt Çakırlar focused on the film’s formal/stylistic choices and the extent to which these choices reify a transnational feminist accent while undermining the local intricacies of gender politics. Finally, Elif Akçalı discussed the differences in the film’s reception by critically exploring local and international reviews of the film.