Girlhood at the Margins of French Filmmaking: Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang (2015) and Luàna Bajrami’s La Colline où rugissent les lionnes (2022)

This article demonstrates how the transnational interactions on- and off-screen in the Franco-Turkish Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015) and the Franco-Kosovar La Colline où rugissent les lionnes (Luàna Bajrami, 2022) influence the films’ representation of girlhood. While set beyond France’s borders, the protagonists’ quest for girlhood power or luminosity reveals how these films are influenced by their transnational Frenchness. This article interrogates how the characters’ experience of culturally specific gendered oppression is positioned in opposition to what is constructed as liberated European French girlhood, exemplified by the French republican values of equality, education and mobility. With France thus both the centre and the periphery in these films, this article argues that the films’ transnationality is central to understanding how, caught between the promised luminosity of republican girlhood and their own experiences of girlhood as a site of oppression, the characters are constrained by the margins of identity.