Interview of the LUX Prize 2015 to Deniz Gamze ERGÜVEN, Director of "Mustang" during the EP plenary session in Strasbourg.

Strasbourg

interview

LUX Cinema Prize 2015 (T)

LUX Prize 2015: interview of the winner Deniz Gamze ERGÜVEN, Director of "Mustang"

SOUNDBITE (French), Deniz Gamze ERG&#220;VEN, film Director &quot;Mustang&quot;, It is an absolute honour to be here at the European Parliament, to be able to say a few words at the EP tribune, to have at the same time the possibility to make the movie seen, to receive this tribute and to take the floor, it is for me a supreme honour.

SOUNDBITE (French), Deniz Gamze ERG&#220;VEN, I wished to have a film title expressing the temperament of those girls, at the same time undaunted, spirited, to express their force. There is also a true vision when we see them running throughout the village with their long wild hair in the wind; they look a bit like mustangs. The first line in the scenario said that Lale (the youngest of the sisters in the film) have something of a wild animal. So it was directly the answer to the questions: 'which kind of wild animal?' I also have one of my cousins with a forename in Turkish literally meaning "wild little horse". So it was like a spot directing us to this title.

SOUNDBITE (French), Deniz Gamze ERG&#220;VEN, The film is having some parts linked to reality. That means that the basis of each scene are inspired from real, like the little scandal that the girls are making at the beginning of the movie when they are accused of immorality while playing innocently with their friends. This was considered much too sour for their village. This is a situation that I experienced. The orphan girls of their age - it was a situation in my family at previous generation. The scene like the one of Selma who is taken to the hospital in the night of her wedding night because she was not bleeding, it is a situation that a physician in Ankara told me as being recurrent. It is not a situation he have seen only once in his career. There are several cases, something like 40 up to 50 cases in his public hospital during the marriage session, in the spring and summer.

SOUNDBITE (French), Deniz Gamze ERG&#220;VEN, Where the fiction comes is that when I was in the same situation like at the beginning of the film, when we were accused of doing something disgusting because we have sited on the boys shoulders I was being mortified, while in the film the girls are starting by breaking the chairs of the kitchen and argue with a kind of strength I haven't have myself at the time. It is as from this moment that the fiction starts, and we are having characters greater than in live.

SOUNDBITE (English), Deniz Gamze ERG&#220;VEN, As next step, I'm working with Alice Winocour, the co-writer of Mustang, to a new scenario placed in Istanbul. There are a few projects on the table. We are in a period while I'm still waiting that one of the films in project takes the pol-position and will crystalize before the others.