Kira Kovalenko and Kantemir Balagov, Guest Directors, Telluride Film Festival 2021

    

Some of the most powerful tragic stories originate at the borderline between tradition and modernity. Our two guest directors hail from such a space, North Caucasus. There, according to legend, Prometheus, the primal modernizer, was chained to Mount Elbrus as punishment for giving the humans the new technology—fire.

Unclenching the Fists. 2021

    

In their art, Kira Kovalenko and Kantemir Balagov embraced the explosive forces produced by the clash of cultures, its violence, and the deep trauma left in its wake. Perhaps their mentor Alexander Sokurov chose to locate his film school in their hometown of Nalchik—the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, where a quarter of a million people live in the shadow of Mount Elbrus—because it is place where tribal traditions and Russian imperial modernity have long been locked in a brutal embrace. If so, he has not been disappointed in his students.

While Kovalenko and Balagov have collaborated on their film projects, each has chosen a path of her or his own. Both have been recognized at Cannes, among other venues, Kantemir for TESNOTA (CLOSENESS) (2017) and BEANPOLE (2019), and Kira for UNCLENCHING THE FISTS (2021). BEANPOLE and UNCLENCHING THE FISTS were chosen to represent Russia at the Academy Awards.

Honors aside, the two have opened a fascinating dialogue, reminiscent of the golden age of Italian cinema, that offers new ways of seeing — universally relevant, yet steeped in local particularities of ordinary lives.

Set in a small mining town in North Ossetia and shot with the nervous immediacy by a hand-held camera, Kovalenko’s UNCLENCHING THE FISTS distills a family story to its almost literal essence—how to unlock a father’s fists as he grips his daughter in a deadly embrace, both characters frozen in time by a violent trauma. Balagov’s CLOSENESS, a story of grinding cultural friction and individuation, ends on an ambiguous note: a rebellious young woman rejoins her parents as they flee their home to seek refuge in a distant city.

Unclenching the Fists

Balagov’s BEANPOLE, set in Leningrad at the end of World War II, closes with two war-scarred young women embracing the illusion of a false pregnancy. Here Balagov goes for the jugular: is art — also an illusion — what sustains us? Real art—a miracle, as in the films of Kira and Kantemir—does.

In a feat of historical irony, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the brutal political repression imposed by the Kremlin have forced these two apolitical but deeply humane film makers to flee their country. Opposed to the war, they now seek a new home in the U.S. Like Prometheus from a lost play by Aeschylus, they are now unbound and free to create. Among the works they selected is a startling set of films, all sharing in the notion of “miracle."

Welcome to the mountains of Telluride!

—Grisha Freidin. August 2021