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‘It's like everything changed in a blink of an eye, one moment we were fine, then everything changed to shit’.
Learning from experience in our own way and in our own time is what we each need. But it is not what we each get. Sometimes the shadow of adult sexuality brutally thrusts its way into our childhood or adolescence just as we are attempting to find out for ourselves the nuanced world of sexual experience. Amongst other important intra-cultural concerns, Mustang attempts to explore these sensitive issues. It is an extraordinarily intense, dream-like film with distinctly archetypal, fairy-tale qualities. Released in 2015, Mustang was directed and co-written by a Turkish-French woman, Deniz Gamze Ergrüven. The film describes the complex and dramatic tension between a deeply conservative, yet unconsciously highly sexualized, adult culture and its adolescents, as seen through the sometimes brutal sexual transitioning of five orphaned sisters living together with their grandmother and uncle in a remote area of Turkey.
Both parents having died years before, the orphan trope becomes crucial in this film alongside the search for genuinely containing parental care. Sensuously playful and mutually protective of one another, the sisters have developed a merged group culture: a powerhouse of naturally evolving female sexuality operating as a single, sometimes rebellious organism. Motherless: the sibling group has become an embodied and loving Good Mother. Fatherless: the more courageous of them (the oldest and the youngest sisters) strongly demonstrate a mostly benign and naturally fierce paternal morality. Yet these attributes are insufficient to protect this group of orphaned sisters from the transgenerational transmission of sexual shame, which seems to be a predominant complex in their immediate family.