Kira Kovalenko Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Italian actor and director Valeria Golino has been set as jury president for the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival this year.

We’ve said it quite a bit over the past few years, but the MUBI streaming service is one of the most underrated subscription services for film fans. Up there with The Criterion Channel, MUBI is a showcase of some of the best films from around the world, featuring selections that you likely wouldn’t be able to see anywhere else.

A Russian court has issued a warrant for the arrest of prominent international film producer Alexander Rodnyansky as well as theater director Ivan Vyrypaev for “spreading false information about the war” in Ukraine.

Even as Cannes just wrapped up last month, and Tribeca is still going on this week, all eyes on the Festival circuit are turning towards Fall, and the all-important stops like Venice, Toronto, and Telluride that will be kicking off the fest circuit likely to set the table for awards season.  And others are making early moves now as New York Film Festival organizers were in town last week holding a reception for studio and PR reps and press to pump up interest in their Fall festival even before that other aforementioned NY based fest got rolling with its opening night. Leaders of the Toronto International Film Festival were also in town this Spring holding meetings and lunches to assure the industry it would be returning to business as usual in person this Fall. All the festival heads are busy seeing early previews of films that hope to use the Fall fests to launch Oscar campaigns.

Zack Sharf Italian director, actor and producer Valeria Golino will serve as the president of the jury for this year’s Un Certain Regard sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival. Golino follows in the footsteps of last year’s jury president Andrea Arnold.

Kira Kovalenko’s feature Unclenching the Fists was initially inspired by a line in William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust. Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International awards-season event, the Russian director said she thought a lot about Faulkner’s line, “While some people can endure slavery, nobody can stand freedom,” when she began co-writing her sophomore film, which is now Russia’s submission into this year’s International Feature Oscar race.

To open: Ada (Milana Aguzarova), a young woman living in North Ossetia, is planted against the cement wall by the freeway. As the tumult of cars rushes by, a young man — the seemingly lovesick Tamik (Arsen Khetagurov) — calls for her.

Guy Lodge Film CriticAcross cinema’s long lineage of stories about young women attempting to shake parental control and seize their own destinies, few protagonists have needed to escape quite as viscerally as Ada, the unbearably put-upon heroine of Russian director Kira Kovalenko’s imposing sophomore feature “Unclenching the Fists.” In poor health and kept under literal lock and key by her widowed, loveless father, she fears time is running out for her to make a run for it — though where on

Guy Lodge Film CriticCANNES — At a banner ceremony for female filmmakers, Russian writer-director Kira Kovalenko’s sophomore feature “Unclenching the Fists” won the top prize for best film in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival this evening, from a jury headed by British filmmaker Andrea Arnold.

Christopher Vourlias When she was growing up in Nalchik, the capital of Russia’s remote Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Kira Kovalenko wasn’t particularly interested in cinema. She can cite few films that inspired her as a girl.

“Clara Sola” and a naturalistic one in the African film “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” and it’s even surfaced in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s documentary about her mother, Jane Birkin, “Jane by Charlotte,” in Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II” and in Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World.”Of those films, most are by female directors.