‘Ulya’ Director Dives Into His Third Latvian Oscar Contender, Which Stars a Rising Actor as a Female Basketball Legend and Became a “Blockbuster”

Latvia made Oscar history in 2025 when Gints Zilbalodis‘ Flow won the best animated feature award. Two years later, the country has selected a very different movie to represent it at the Oscars 2027. The Baltic country picked Ulya from director Viesturs Kairišs (January), which stars up-and-coming Latvian actor Kārlis Arnolds Avots and world-premiered at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section, as its international best feature film Oscar contender.

Inspired by the life of legendary Latvian basketball player Uljana Semjonova, a two-time Olympic champion and three-time world champion, the black-and-white Ulya follows its protagonist from an isolated rural Old Believer community into the fiercely competitive world of professional basketball. There, she must navigate both the attention drawn by her extraordinary height and the demands of elite sport.

Semjonova ended up winning the Soviet Union’s national championship and the European Champions Cup 15 times each, the Olympic Gold medal with the USSR in 1976 and 1980, and she became the first non-U.S. woman in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

On Friday, Ulya will open the 30th edition of Estonia’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF). As a co-production between Latvia, Poland, Estonia and Lithuania, it is also a symbol for the rise of Baltic cinema on the world stage. “Ulya is a very good example of what the Baltic film industries can achieve by working together and with partners beyond our region,” said Triin Tramberg, artistic director of PÖFF. “Our countries may be small, but we have a wealth of stories and creative talent. Co-productions bring those strengths together, help ambitious films reach audiences around the world and give our filmmakers a stronger international presence.”

Avots wrote the script with Livia Ulman and Andris Feldmanis. Wojciech Staroń is the cinematographer, with editing by Armands Zacs. B-Rated International is handling sales for Ulya, produced by Ego Media in Latvia, Allfilm in Estonia, Staroń Film in Poland and Tremora in Lithunia. New Mountain Films has acquired Ulya for North America.

Latvia, which has a population of about 1.8 million, comparable to that of West Virginia, has previously sent two other Kairišs films to the Oscars: his 2022 movie January, a coming-of-age story about an aspiring filmmaker looking to find himself against the backdrop of Latvian independence, and his 2017 film The Chronicles of Melanie, based on the real-life story of a woman who, along with her son, was sent to a labor camp in Siberia in the 1940s after the Soviet occupation of Latvia.

Kairišs talked to THR about Ulya, bringing to life the inner world of a legendary athlete, and how the film, has become a blockbuster in Latvia.

The filmmaker and Avots previously worked together on January. And Kairišs knew that the star was considering writing a play about Semjonova and starring in it. “I heard from Kārlis for a while that his dream was to play Uljana Semjonova,” the director tells THR. When the star told another creative about the idea, “I realized, wow, it’s a film. It’s not a theater play.”

Kairišs didn’t have his eyes on a historical project. “I was a little bit tired of making films connected with Latvian history,” he recalls. “I was not very interested in making something about sports or whatever. But I heard the story about a giant girl living in the deep countryside and then coming to Riga, with the coaches of that time taking her away. And I was seriously touched by this beginning. I immediately had this first image in my head about some far-away environment where a strange tall girl lives, and people suddenly start to look for her.”

Having a male play the female basketball legend was not something he dwelt on. “This was a package. Kārlis is playing Ulya,” Kairišs says. “For me, it was immediately okay. I had to do it. But when we were looking for co-producers’ money, very often people were concerned about how it would look and if it would [seem like] a caricature or something. But I always said it sounds great. It’s a film about Ulya, and it’s not my idea. And I’m totally not interested in just a, let’s say, ‘normal’ or traditional film.”

Avots told THR earlier this year that, for him, Ulya felt like a story similar to Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. And his director had the same instinct. “My first impulse was that this is a little bit like a Werner Herzog film about a giant,” he shares.

Asked about other influences, the director mentions that he suggested that he and cinematographer Staroń watch Ingmar Bergman’s psychological drama Persona. “It’s probably an influence, or an influence on the aesthetic,” Kairišs acknowledges.

But the physical look and movements were mainly key to diving inside the person at the heart of the film. “My first major task for myself and the artistic team was how to go into her mind,” the filmmaker tells THR. “I was interested in showing the film from her inside right from the beginning. Of course, there are a lot of objective things, but I still found it important to show the invisible world of this human.”

As Avots told THR earlier in the year, Semjonova was a neighbor of his in Latvia’s capital, Riga. They developed a bond, and she trusted the team behind the film. The end of Ulya features a symbol of that bond: a photo of the athlete, who died in January, with Avots.

Focusing on one special person and her challenges and story helped make the film feel universal, the filmmaker believes. “While we were trying to go inside her head and make a very subjective film, it somehow also became a film about all of us – everybody who can identify with having an inner freak that we hold inside,” Kairišs offers. “Everybody has something that you want to hide that responds to all the standards that the modern world demands of you. You are somehow killing your darling, probably, your real authenticity, so the film is very universal.”

How does the director feel about Ulya representing Latvia in the international Oscar race? “It’s my third time,” he emphasizes. “You go to those Oscars with a small budget from Latvia, but the response to the film at screenings has always been amazing. And [premiering at] the Cannes festival was a dream for me.”

Kairišs also emphasizes the box-office success that Ulya has become back home. “In Latvia, it’s a real blockbuster,” reaching around 105,000 admissions and counting since its launch earlier this year, he says. That makes Ulya the most successful Latvian film in the country’s cinemas in 2026, putting it ahead of such Hollywood blockbusters as The Odyssey and Minions & Monsters. It is currently even the second most successful film of 2026 overall in Latvian cinemas, just behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Says its director: “It’s an unbelievable success for a black-and-white art house film.”