23/08/2021 - Kira Kovalenko's complex love-hate relationship drama develops within a family, played by a mixed ensemble of actors and locally discovered non-professionals

Unclenching the Fists [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the Un Certain Regard winner from the latest Cannes Film Festival, has just been shown in the Sarajevo Film Festival’s Kinoscope programme, where it fitted perfectly with the theme of the main competition, exploring the destinies of a variety of oppressed women. The plot focuses on young Ada (Milana Aguzarova), who lives in a godforsaken place with her mentally challenged and thus needy brother Dakko (Khetag Bibilov) and their despotic father (Alik Karaev), who claims to protect her while actually sucking out her energy and not letting her grow up. Feeling clamped up in this smothering private environment while living in a place that offers no perspective for the future, Ada puts all her hopes on her older brother Akim (Soslan Khugaev), who works in Rostov, to get her out of there or at least bring her to the doctor as she’s suffering the consequences of being wounded as a child, without a clear reference to concrete events, but most probably during the Beslan school siege. She’s also chased daily by Tamik (Arsen Khetagurov) who is in love with her: Ada finds herself surrounded by obsessive men who are projecting on her their immature cravings. She wants to escape this situation, without really finding a way out due to a life-long dependency and natural affection for her closed ones.

The filming location – the North Ossetian former mining town of Mizur, with a population of about 3000 people – is literally squeezed between cliffs and consists of a few prefabricated, communist style buildings spread along a river canyon. Such an isolated place is the perfect exterior setting for a claustrophobic drama about emotional symbiosis, while the interiors, cluttered with objects and dimly lit, are even more suffocating. Pavel Fomintsev’s camera sticks closely to Ada’s figure and rhythmically shakes as it follows her frenetic movements, like those of a frightened deer, which contributes to an overall atmosphere of anxiety. Her constant wanderings turn Unclenching the Fists into a very physical film in which dialogues often transform into bodily clashes, and embraces into clinging grips. Those episodes of action build the skeleton of an otherwise loose dramaturgy. In terms of palette, Ada’s purple jacket and the colourful clothes she sells in a shop contrast with the grey dusty ambience, functioning as a visual manifestation of her desperate search for individuality out of the family.

Russian director Kira Kovalenko, who, just like Kantemir Balagov (winner of the Un Certain Regard FIPRESCI Prize for both Closeness [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Beanpole [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), graduated from Alexander Sokurov’s directing workshop at Kabardino-Balkarian State University, was inspired by Italian neorealist aesthetics, mentioning Vittorio de Sica’s works as her favourites. The title of the film itself is a reference to Marco Bellocchio’s debut Fists in the Pocket (1965), which follows the lives of several generations of a single family living in an enclosed space. Along with drama student Milana Aguzarova, with her penetrating gaze, and experienced actor Alik Karaev, Kovalenko cast a number of locally scouted non-professionals including wrestler Soslan Khugaev, whose input is truly neorealistic in its authenticity. In her director’s statement, she also shared that she wanted to explore subjects like unprocessed trauma and the unbearable burden of freedom. It’s hard to say this goal was achieved on a rational level, mostly because of the unstable narrative with hints that are not always clear, however, emotion-wise, the film does get under your skin.

Unclenching the Fists was produced by Russian company Non-stop Production and is sold internationally by Wild Bunch International.