the m0vie blog

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Darren Mooney and Conor Murphy, this week with special guest Natasha Waugh, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

This September, we are running a season looking at the films on the Irish Leaving Cert English Curriculum. So this week, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang.

In a remote Turkish village along the Black Sea, five young sisters find themselves locked inside the family house. Destined to be married off one-at-a-time, the five girls struggle to hold on to their humanity and their spirit in the face of soul-crushing oppression. Can they escape this captivity and can they emerge with their selves truly intact?

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

Show Notes:

• Recorded 3rd August 2023.
• Note: Due to the COVID-19 situation, this episode was recorded remotely. We suspect, going forward that a lot of our episodes will be until the crisis resolves.
• Mustang at The Internet Movie Database.
• Follow Conor on Twitter.
• Follow The Video Trolley on Twitter.
• Read Conor’s film criticism at The Video Trolley.
• Follow Natasha Waugh on Twitter.
• Visit NatashaWaugh.ie.
• Watch Terminal, 2016.
• Watch Mother, 2019.
• Mark Olsen at The Los Angeles Times considers the international success of Mustang, February 2016.
• Donald Clarke at The Irish Time reports on Viva‘s addition to the Oscars shortlist, December 2015.
• Jack Rico at NBC News considers the awards success of Embrace the Serpent, January 2016.
• Jeffrey Fleishman at The Los Angeles Times considers the awards success of Son of Saul, February 2016.
• Alex Dobuzinskis at Reuters zooms in on a particularly bleak foreign film field for the Academy Awards, February 2016.
• Naman Ramachandran at Cineuropa reports on the success of Mustang at the Dublin Film Critics Circle, March 2016.
• Sonia Nazario at The Los Angeles Times reports on the challenges of teaching children about suicide, March 1997.
• Donna Boundy at The New York Times reports on debates over how schools teach the subject of suicide, October 1985.
• Kate Manne writes at The New York Times about her use of trigger warnings, September 2015.
• Jeremy Engle at The New York Times reflects on the debate over trigger warnings, November 2018.
• Sofie Karasek at The New York Times argues for the importance of trigger warnings to students, September 2016.
• Niraj Chokshi at The New York Times reports on studies of the efficacy of trigger warnings, March 2019.
• Dani Anguiano at The Guardian reports on Bill Cosby being found liable for the sexual assault of a minor, June 2022.
• Natalie Hope McDonald at Vulture reports on Bill Cosby’s overturned sexual assault conviction, March 2022.
• W. Kamau Bell talks to NPR about the challenge in talking about Bill Cosby, February 2022.
• Gene Demby at NPR considers the complicated legacy of Bill Cosby’s contributions to television, April 2018.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to The New York Times about making Mustang, November 2015.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to The Guardian about her life and her career, May 2016.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to SBS about her background and about developing the film, May 2016.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to DCist about the Frenchness of Mustang, February 2016.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to Criterion about her discomfort with how Turkey is portrayed in films like Midnight Express, December 2015.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to CultureWhisper about seeing Turkey filtered through the lens of movies like Midnight Express, May 2016.
• Kaya Genç considers Mustang at The Los Angeles Review of Books, April 2016.
• Selin Gökcesu criticises the cultural inauthenticity of Mustang at The Rumpus, May 2016.
• Suna Erdem at IntelliNews considers the Turkish response to Mustang, February 2016.
• Odie Henderson reviews Kings at RogerEbert.com, April 2018.
• David Rooney reviews Kings for The Hollywood Reporter, September 2017.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven writes at The Hot Corn about how she decided to write Kings, April 2018.
• Phil Hoad at The Guardian considers the rise of “the postcard-arthouse movie”, December 2013.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to Little White Lies about the inherent contradictions of Turkish attitudes towards women, May 2016.
• The Guardian reports on a speech by Bülent Arinc about the role of women in Turkish society, July 2014.
• The Guardian reports of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s remarks on International Women’s Day, March 2016.
• Jonathan Romney at FilmComment places a key television speech in Mustang in its cultural context, November 2015.
• Laura Nicholson at Red Pepper discusses the cultural and social context of Mustang in terms of Turkey’s slide towards authoritarianism, November 2016.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to Filmmaker Magazine about shooting the soccer scene in Mustang, September 2015.
• Jonathan Lewis at The Guardian reports on the women-only soccer matches in Turkey, September 2011.
• Sandra Garcia profiles Tarana Burke and the #metoo movement for The New York Times, October 2017.
• Reggie Ugwu at The New York Times compiles an oral history of the #OscarsSoWhite movement, February 2020.
• Patty Jenkins talks to The Playlist about her “directing drought” after directing Monster, January 2019.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to The Los Angeles Times about how Mustang almost fell through because she became pregnant before production, November 2015.
• Haifaa Al Mansour talks to CNN about being a female film director in Saudi Arabia, unable to go to the movies, May 2012.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to The Huffington Post about the importance of diversity behind the camera, February 2016.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to Vulture about working with male camera operators, February 2016.
• Deniz Gamze Ergüven talks to Smart Girls about the guerilla filmmaking of Mustang, November 2015.
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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: authenticity, awards, conor murphy, conservatism, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, feminism, foreign film, islam, Misogyny, mustang, natasha waugh, Oscars, religion, trigger warnings, Turkey |