About the Film
Despite young Ada’s bleak life and the patriarchal prison shackling her world, dreams, and desires, she’s determined to get her freedom, requiring her to overcome social taboos and deteriorating traditions while anticipating a punch that relaxes the fists tightly strangling her future.
A notable family film that relays the cinematic saga about a defeated human being’s will, Unclenching the Fists won the Un Certain Regard Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. The film also showcases an isolated violent world, unemployed people who can’t find a significant life, a harsh mountainous environment, and an aimless existence.
Adults reflect their biases on confrontational youths, who are only concerned with seizing any opportunity to move to larger cities "full of life and events", as defined by Ada’s older brother Akim.
The heroine lives in a hellish remote town, navigating her loyalties, her obsession over lost hopes, a boring job, a passing romantic relationship, as well as strict isolation enforced by her obstinate father.
Ada also deals with a man who sees her as his private property, telling her that she won’t leave him, with his fists tightening around her body.
Relying on a hand-held camera, director Kira Kovalenko goes between stressful scenes of a small apartment that doubles as the scene of a daily generational war and scenes inside the messy shop where Ada works and fails to get to know her femininity.
Kovalenko also showcases final scenes, in which residents, relatives, and neighbors are ruled by invisible fists that tighten the leash on their daily lives, empty except for addiction and violence.
Having escaped bloodshed as a child during the Belsan Massacre, Ada is the political conscience of a major crime. While her soul remains determined to take back her life, her true tragedy is encapsulated in her bodily disfiguration.
Ziad Al Khuzai
