Viesturs Kairišs’ beautifully shot biopic of Latvian basketball legend Ulyana Semjonova is a portrait of an outsider struggling to find her place in the world.
Viesturs Kairišs’ Ulya tells the story of Ulyana Semjonova, the Latvian basketball player who would go on to become one of the greatest athletes the sport has ever known. Set in 1964, the film follows Ulya (Kārlis Arnolds Avots), an exceptionally tall teenager from an Old Believer farming family, whose extraordinary height attracts the attention of basketball scouts in Riga. Leaving the only life she has ever known, she hopes to find a place where she can belong, only to discover that the world beyond her village is no less preoccupied with her body.
I watched the movie at this year’s Rome Film Fest, never having heard of Semjonova before, and was enraptured by the film’s intimate imagery. Cinematographer Wojciech Staroń’s is strikingly impressionistic, moving between the open landscapes of rural Latvia and the blurred, disorientating world that Ulya encounters in the city, capturing all the confusing, exhilarating, often alienating experience of leaving home for the first time.
Avots gives a great performance as Ulya, conveying her awkwardness, vulnerability and kindness. Ulya’s perseverance, the sense of otherworldliness and the overlooked socio-historical setting all make for a brilliant story. If anything, I could have done with more of the context, the conditions of Soviet Latvia in the 1970s, and at times the film’s deliberate pacing and introspective approach make it a little slow. But there is plenty to admire in Kairišs’ sensitive direction and the film’s striking visual world.
Ulya captures the universal coming of age narrative of a girl finding a way to live comfortably in her own skin through the depiction of the life of one of basketball’s under-sung heroes.
The 21st edition of the Rome Film Fest is running from October 13th to 25th, 2026.
