Ulya

 “Being looked at is dangerous, because one risks becoming what others see.”
 — John Berger 

In ULYA, growth is never merely biological: it becomes an ontological deviation, a fracture in the way the world decides who deserves visibility and who must remain at the margins of the visible. Set in Soviet Latvia during the 1960s, the film takes the figure of Ulya — a teenage girl nearly two meters tall, belonging to a community of Old Believers — and transforms her into a radical question about the right to a nonconforming existence. 

“If a man is great, he is God, not a mistake of nature”: this sentence, which traverses the film like an unresolved thought, is not a declaration of innocence but an ethical short circuit. What the world calls an “error” is simply whatever exceeds the socially acceptable use of the body. From the very beginning, Ulya is an excess. Yet an excess that does not explode: it folds inward, questions itself, withdraws. 

Her childhood on the Paberze farm, immersed in the snowy fields of Latgale, unfolds within a suspended temporality in which her gigantic body has not yet become a public destiny. It is still domestic intimacy, agricultural gesture, helping her mother, the continuous need for emotional reassurance. She still wants to ask her mother for everything, even the smallest everyday gesture, such as cutting her hair, as though childhood were desperately trying to survive inside a body growing far too quickly. And yet the fracture is already there: Ulya’s body is too readable. Too evident. Too exposed to the interpretation of others. 

When a school photograph intercepts the gaze of the outside world — that of the basketball coaches from Riga — life opens up like a narrative wound. The transition from the countryside to the capital is not emancipation but a displacement of perspective: Ulya does not change worlds; she merely changes regimes of observation. In Riga she is no longer “daughter,” “girl,” “domestic presence”: she becomes athletic function, statistical promise, sporting instrument. 

Like in Bolesno (Sick) by Hrvoje Mahić the film constructs its cruelest intuition: every system — familial, athletic, ideological — tends to reduce the subject to what is useful about them. Ulya is not loved for what she is, but for what can be extracted from her. 

And yet even the dream of “normality” reveals itself as a fragile construction. The promised city, with its taller buildings and seemingly more similar bodies, does not absorb her difference: it amplifies it. Height does not disappear within urban space; it becomes even more visible. The promise of inclusion turns into permanent exposure. 

Sporting life — discipline, sacrifice, the construction of possible national glory — does not save Ulya from her condition: it radicalizes it. The team wants her strong, efficient, decisive. But no one seems willing to want her whole. Even love, when it appears, functions as an ambiguous mechanism: someone claims to love her only to confess they were forced to do so; others desire her as an exotic exception; still others attempt to protect her only to isolate her more effectively from emotional danger. Emblematic in this sense is the beach party sequence: while watching two young people kiss, Ulya suddenly realizes that there exists a spontaneous intimacy from which she appears excluded, as though desire itself had already decided who may belong to the realm of tenderness and who must remain outside it. 

Within this network of gazes that define her without ever granting her autonomous form, the film’s central question emerges: what does it mean to be seen, when the gaze of the other is never neutral but always an act of appropriation? 

Her return to the village is not a return to origins but another disillusionment. There too, among the trees and barns, Ulya discovers that her strength has already been interpreted: it is useful for labor, for endurance, for carrying what others cannot. There is no place where the body may simply exist as body. 

When she is offered the definitive opportunity — moving with her family to Leningrad, living in a large apartment, attending the best school, and preparing for her final chance to permanently join the national team — the film stages not triumph but disorientation. Everyone seems convinced they know what is best for her. Everyone is ready to judge her, direct her, choose on her behalf. Ulya, meanwhile, remains suspended within a profoundly human confusion: whether her destiny truly coincides with the talent others project onto her body. 

At this point, the film moves onto an existential threshold: either hide, or exceed all limits completely. Become invisible or become the greatest. Yet both possibilities are merely different forms of the same externally imposed question. 

The mother, a central and silent figure, perhaps represents the film’s only authentic ethical counterpoint: she does not decide for Ulya but continually returns her to the possibility of desire itself. Not “what should you become,” but “what do you feel.” Within this minimal gesture a rupture opens: freedom not as conquest, but as the suspension of judgment. 

The black-and-white cinematography is fundamental in translating all this into sensory matter. Opaque, veiled, at times almost deforming, the image does not document reality: it withholds it. Bodies emerge as intermittent presences, never entirely defined, as though matter itself hesitated before deciding what form to assume. The black and white is not historical nostalgia but an ethics of vision: it subtracts color in the same way certainty is subtracted. 

Within this visual landscape, snow is never pure: it is already memory, already loss, already distance. And Ulya’s body becomes a perceptual threshold: that which exceeds visual normativity forces the spectator to reconsider their own way of seeing. 

The film thus unfolds as a meditation on the impossibility of an uninterpreted life. There is no neutral point from which Ulya may finally “be herself,” because every identity has already been anticipated by a social gaze. Her tragedy is not difference itself, but the endless translation of difference into function. 

And yet, at its most fragile point, the film opens a possibility: not normality, but self-definition. Not becoming what others fail to see, but consciously choosing one’s own exposure. Hiding beneath the tall trees of Latgale or entering definitively into the playing field of the world: not as object, but as agent. 

Within this unresolved oscillation, ULYA portrays a suspension. And perhaps it is precisely here that the film discovers its most radical truth: in the idea that identity is not a place to reach, but a conflict to inhabit. 

“There is no normality worth the price of self-renunciation.”
 — Simone de Beauvoir