Unclenching the Fists

Unclenching the Fists (Разжимая кулаки) is a 2021 Ossetian-language Russian drama film directed by Kira Kovalenko. In July 2021, the film won the Un Certain Regard award at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. It was selected as the Russian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.

Plot
Ada, stifled by her overbearing father and by her lack of prospects, dreams of escaping from her life in a small town of Mizur in North Ossetia, Russia.

Cast

 * Milana Aguzarova as Ada
 * Alik Karayev as Father
 * Soslan Khugayev as Akim

Reception
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 86% based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 7.9/10. The website's critical consensus states: "A daring feature debut for director/co-writer Kira Kovalenko, Unclenching the Fists, explores how family ties can stifle as much as they support". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

In their co-authored review for the Los Angeles Review of Books', Alexis Bliziotis and Sasha Karsavina analyse the film as a metaphor for Russia's current cultural climate of historical revisionism, in which ethnic and linguistic minorities get erased and forgotten.

Salon.com's Gary M. Kramer, praised the director's view calling it "[an] urgent, unsentimental approach [is] what makes Unclenching the Fists so potent".

Diego Semerene of Slant Magazine wrote "Unclenching the Fists is a tale of how the desolation of a nation inhabits and engraves a woman's body".