'Mustang' is a stirring tale of girlhood

Fresh from its nomination at the Oscars, ‘Mustang’ opens the Cork French Film festival, writes Helen Barlow

AFTER her stunning directing debut Mustang in Cannes last year, Deniz Gamze Ergüven was hailed as the Turkish Sofia Coppola. While the 37-year-old might share a certain youthfulness and beauty with the American director, and a talent for directing young women, the comparison is not quite right.

Where Coppola’s sisters in her 1999 film The Virgin Suicides were depressed and doomed, Ergüven — in the opening offering of the Cork French Film Festival — presents five self-possessed siblings who fight against the restrictions that have been enforced upon them after innocently playing with boys on a beach in contemporary Turkey.