Cannes Review: Directors' Fortnight Prize Winner 'Mustang' By First-Timer Deniz Gamze Ergüven

In a tangle of limbs and long hair, five young sisters in a small coastal Turkish town come of age against a backdrop of sun, secrets, and socially-mandated sexual suppression in Deniz Gamze Ergüven's heartfelt, beautifully performed debut feature "Mustang." Co-written with 2015 Un Certain Regard director Alice Winocour (our review of her film "Disorder" is here), the film presents an insightful, engaging, and often enraging perspective on the treatment of women, and especially pubescent girls, living within a restrictive and regressive cultural environment. In this small community, female sexuality is regarded as a treacherous and dangerous force that must be corralled and owned in its entirety by men (i.e. the girls must be married extremely young, and they must be virgins). But while the view of this culture is undoubtedly authentic, it is coded by the filmmaker's criticism — highly justifiable criticism, but it's a bias that should be...