Latvian Oscar Entry 'Ulya' Sells Across Many Territories Before Opening Tallinn Black Nights

"Ulya," Latvia's submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar, continues to attract international distributors. The film has now been sold to a long list of territories as it prepares to open the 30th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Buyers include New Mountain Films for North America, Destiny for France, Invisible Carpet for Italy and ASFK for Slovakia. Five Star Distribution has taken former Yugoslavia, Hea Film has Estonia, GPI has Lithuania, Teleview has the MENA region, Cinema Orion has Finland, 1989 has Poland and Belas Arte has Brazil.

Directed by Viesturs Kairišs, the black-and-white film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. It was produced by Ego Media of Latvia, Allfilm of Estonia, Staroń Film of Poland and Tremora of Lithuania, and is sold internationally by B-Rated International.

The story is inspired by the life of Ulyana Semjonova, the legendary basketball player born in 1952, but it is not a conventional biopic. Kairišs told Variety that he has no interest in making a "nice, typical biopic" and that his taste runs to arthouse cinema. He said he was not thinking much about sport, and instead wanted to tell "a Werner Herzog-esque story about a giant girl living in the countryside."

Semjonova stood seven feet tall, a size that also made her something of a recluse. To capture her inner world, the filmmakers stayed close to her point of view, using what Kairišs called "crazy cameras" and slightly out-of-focus shots. He described finding the landscape of her inner soul as a very concrete task.

The project began with the lead actor, Kārlis Arnolds Avots, who had long wanted to play Semjonova. Kairišs recalled that when he became artistic director of the Dailes Theatre and invited Avots to join the ensemble, the actor said he would like to play her. Kairišs then forgot about it. Years later, during work on the film "January," he overheard Avots explaining the idea to the director of photography and realized: "It's a film!"

Others still needed persuading. "Everyone wanted us to make a standard biopic," Kairišs said, adding that it could have been a good film but would not have been his. Semjonova herself gave her blessing, as a photograph of her with Avots at the end of the film shows. She died in January 2026. "She trusted us," Kairišs said.

The director said the film has resonated with all kinds of viewers, regardless of their size. "We had incredible reactions everywhere in Latvia. This film is a blockbuster," he said, noting that it is already the second most-watched film in Latvian history. He said reactions were similarly strong at Cannes, Rome and Los Angeles, and that none of his earlier films drew this kind of response.

Kairišs linked that response to a wider theme. "There's so much pressure today to look the same and like the same things," he said, arguing that people should learn to trust what makes them feel like a "freak" and embrace it as the best thing about them.