A quietly phenomenal performance by Milana Aguzarova as a young woman trying to break free from the unsettling relationships within her stifling family
Like her partner Kantemir Balagov’s 2019 film Beanpole, there’s an uncanny claustrophobic charge to Kira Kovalenko’s family drama, though it finally exhales an equally powerful sigh of self-redemption. Milana Aguzarova stars as Ada, a young woman in a North Ossetian mining town trapped by her ailing and possessive father Zaur (Alik Karaev). He guards the only front door key, letting her and her siblings out when he chooses, and refuses to let her have an operation to correct injuries sustained during a school hostage-taking that mean she has to wear an incontinence nappy.
Ada’s brother Akim (Soslan Khugaev) comes home from the city of Rostov and seems to have the self-possession and moral compass Zaur does not. He promises to get her the treatment...
Like her partner Kantemir Balagov’s 2019 film Beanpole, there’s an uncanny claustrophobic charge to Kira Kovalenko’s family drama, though it finally exhales an equally powerful sigh of self-redemption. Milana Aguzarova stars as Ada, a young woman in a North Ossetian mining town trapped by her ailing and possessive father Zaur (Alik Karaev). He guards the only front door key, letting her and her siblings out when he chooses, and refuses to let her have an operation to correct injuries sustained during a school hostage-taking that mean she has to wear an incontinence nappy.
Ada’s brother Akim (Soslan Khugaev) comes home from the city of Rostov and seems to have the self-possession and moral compass Zaur does not. He promises to get her the treatment...
- 5/22/2023
- by Phil Hoad
- The Guardian - Film News
The old adage “write what you know” has rarely paid off with such bleak, persuasive power as it does in Unclenching The Fists, which won the Grand Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar this year, is Russia’s submission to the International Feature race at the Oscars and is screening at AFI Fest. Mubi has U.S. rights and is planning a theatrical release ahead of digital in 2022.
Kira Kovalenko’s confident debut feature is largely based on events of her own youth. Like her fictional heroine Ada (Milana Aguzarova), Kovalenko grew up in a dreary mining town in the Caucasus. She captures, with unsentimental precision, the way life spent with the same few people, year after year, can be both suffocating in its intensity and numbingly dull.
Ada’s home is in North Ossetia, a thinly populated but strategically important wedge of Russia on the border of Georgia and next to Chechnya.
Kira Kovalenko’s confident debut feature is largely based on events of her own youth. Like her fictional heroine Ada (Milana Aguzarova), Kovalenko grew up in a dreary mining town in the Caucasus. She captures, with unsentimental precision, the way life spent with the same few people, year after year, can be both suffocating in its intensity and numbingly dull.
Ada’s home is in North Ossetia, a thinly populated but strategically important wedge of Russia on the border of Georgia and next to Chechnya.
- 11/12/2021
- by Stephanie Bunbury
- Deadline Film + TV
There are clenched fists aplenty in Unclenching the Fists. Stuck in a former mining town high in the mountains of North Ossetia, its characters are as weighed down with misfortune as they are with strained mitts. There are the protagonist Ada’s, racked with frustration; her brother Akim’s, all white-knuckled and ready for swinging; but most obviously there are their father Zaur’s, strict as iron and with a rigor-mortis grip. The film is the second feature from Kira Kovalenko, a filmmaker from Nalchik, in the foothills of the Caucuses—a locale just next Ada’s, and that sense of place is apparent. The film, a bleak and provocative work with few (if any) soft edges, premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regarde sidebar earlier this summer, where it was awarded the Grand Prix by a jury led by Andrea Arnold—another filmmaker synonymous with tales of young women and isolated places,...
- 9/29/2021
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
Claustrophobia suffocates the big screen in Kira Kovalenko’s latest feature, “Unclenching the Fists.” Kovalenko’ sophomore film won Un Certain Regard at Cannes and then made its North American premiere at Telluride. Here — in this ex-mining town — the contrast could not have felt more ironic. Compared to the verdant Rockies, Kovalenko’s film ruminates upon the ashy Caucasus. Rolling hills of dust restrain, rather than expand, the characters on-the-ground — leaving us chained to circumstance along with the rest of the cast. Compared to the glee and the glamor of the festival outdoors, “Unclenching the Fists” languishes in the hopelessness of the future.
After all, nothing much is going for Ada (Milana Aguzarova), a universally adored, single Ossetian woman. After a bombing incident in her childhood, the men in her life just can’t seem to let her go. Her father, Zaur (Alik Karaev), hides her passport to keep her in-town.
After all, nothing much is going for Ada (Milana Aguzarova), a universally adored, single Ossetian woman. After a bombing incident in her childhood, the men in her life just can’t seem to let her go. Her father, Zaur (Alik Karaev), hides her passport to keep her in-town.
- 9/12/2021
- by Grace Han
- AsianMoviePulse
Savvy viewers of bleak Eastern European festival fare will get a sense early on in “Unclenching the Fists” why “Beanpole” director Kantemir Balagov championed this Russian slice of neorealism. Indeed, Kira Kovalenko’s Cannes Un Certain Regard-winning sophomore feature trades in that same kind of brutal austerity, as if the movie was conceived and shot from inside the bowels of a landfill. But at the same time, .
That young woman is Ada, living in a withering industrial town in the agriculturally anemic North Ossetia region of Russia with her father and two brothers. From the outset, her relationship with her father, Zaur (Alik Karaev), is established as one of parasitic codependence — he doesn’t like the perfume she’s wearing, or for her hair to be too long, or for her to be too far out of sight. She, meanwhile, abides his curfews and gets into a nervous state whenever...
That young woman is Ada, living in a withering industrial town in the agriculturally anemic North Ossetia region of Russia with her father and two brothers. From the outset, her relationship with her father, Zaur (Alik Karaev), is established as one of parasitic codependence — he doesn’t like the perfume she’s wearing, or for her hair to be too long, or for her to be too far out of sight. She, meanwhile, abides his curfews and gets into a nervous state whenever...
- 9/4/2021
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Across cinema’s long lineage of stories about young women attempting to shake parental control and seize their own destinies, few protagonists have needed to escape quite as viscerally as Ada, the unbearably put-upon heroine of Russian director Kira Kovalenko’s imposing sophomore feature “Unclenching the Fists.” In poor health and kept under literal lock and key by her widowed, loveless father, she fears time is running out for her to make a run for it — though where on earth to go, in a desolate corner of the North Caucasus where the patriarchy threatens to ensnare her in other ways, is the question giving added urgency to this unusual, stonily moving coming-of-ager.
A tough commercial proposition any way you slice it, “Unclenching the Fists” nonetheless had a dream debut at July’s Cannes Film Festival, where it scored both a multi-territory distribution deal (including North America) with arthouse streamer Mubi...
A tough commercial proposition any way you slice it, “Unclenching the Fists” nonetheless had a dream debut at July’s Cannes Film Festival, where it scored both a multi-territory distribution deal (including North America) with arthouse streamer Mubi...
- 9/2/2021
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
The streamer and distributor has also picked up Benedetta, Memoria, Cow and other titles.
Continuing its Cannes festival buying spree, London-based global streamer and distributor Mubi has picked up all rights for North America, the UK, Ireland, Latin America and India to Un Certain Regard Grand Prize winner Unclenching The Fists.
The second feature from Russian director Kira Kovalenko, the film is set in a former Caucasus mining town, where a young woman struggles to escape the hold of her family. Milana Aguzarova, Alik Karaev, Soslan Khugaev and Khetag Bibilov star.
Wild Bunch is handling international sales on the film.
Continuing its Cannes festival buying spree, London-based global streamer and distributor Mubi has picked up all rights for North America, the UK, Ireland, Latin America and India to Un Certain Regard Grand Prize winner Unclenching The Fists.
The second feature from Russian director Kira Kovalenko, the film is set in a former Caucasus mining town, where a young woman struggles to escape the hold of her family. Milana Aguzarova, Alik Karaev, Soslan Khugaev and Khetag Bibilov star.
Wild Bunch is handling international sales on the film.
- 7/16/2021
- by John Hazelton
- ScreenDaily
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