Unclenching the Fists

Kira Kovalenko’s second feature film is set in a former mining town in North Ossetia (Russia) and portrays Ada, a young woman trying to break free from the family she both rejects and loves. Her family consists of her overly worried, extremely possessive father Zaur, her younger brother Dakko and her eldest brother Akim, the only one to have left the house to look for a job in the city. At the beginning of the film, Ada is nervously waiting for Akim by the bus stop, who is returning from prison. Father Zaur is so determined to keep his daughter close, that he has confiscated her passport, hoping that she will not abandon him, even though Ada urgently needs a surgery to survive a condition which Kovalenko does not really describe. Ada and Dakko have to beg their father to open the front door if they want to leave. The question is if Akim will manage to free his sister.

Kovalenko has said that the film is inspired by a sentence from ‘Intruder in the Dust’ by Faulkner, about how no one can bare freedom, an idea which lies at the core of Ada’s dilemma. How can she abandon her father without collapsing under the terrifying unknown waiting for her beyond the borders of her village? ‘Unclenching the Fists’ is an extremely depressing film, but ever so good in all its depressiveness. The combined IQs of the family probably do not reach eighty. Everything is grubby and filthy, their house as well as the rest of the environment. Ada discovers her sexuality and is more or less raped by her boyfriend. The grubby, brown colours in which the film is drenched do not cheer things up. After this film, you feel the intense need for a blue sky and a deep, green landscape.