‘Ulya’ Cannes Review: The Unlikely Origin Story of Basketball’s Forgotten Giant

Forget Victor Wembanyama. The towering Uļjana «Ulya» Semjonova was one of the first height revolutions in international basketball. Ulya, the film that recalls and celebrates her story, traces the curious journey of a shy, devout, and enormously tall teenager — standing more than two meters — into the future all-time great she would become. Viesturs Kairišs centers his film on this Soviet player — Latvian, to be precise — from her unexpected call-up to a basketball team through her earliest triumphs, long before she became a legend.

It all begins on a farm in the snowy fields of Latgale, where a teenage girl named Ulya (Kārlis Arnolds Avots) lives as part of an Old Believer family, a quietly conservative religious community. Her height is closing in on two meters at an alarming rate and shows no sign of stopping. She has managed to live peacefully in her village, surrounded by her family and helping with the farm work — until a group of unexpected visitors changes everything.

Her older sister’s fiancé secretly sends a photo of Ulya to the coach of the legendary women’s basketball team TTT. The man, seeing enormous potential in the girl, whisks her off to the capital, Riga, over the family’s objections. Ulya leaves hoping she might go unnoticed in the big city, among people taller than those back home — but on the basketball court, her height draws even more attention. There, with the help of her coach, she comes to understand that the only way to escape everyone’s mocking stares is to play the game well.

Ulya follows the girl’s efforts, contradictions, setbacks, and adjustments as she navigates a world where she is perpetually the center of attention without ever quite belonging. She will grow accustomed to it, savoring her first victories — only to eventually feel used, and to sense that something about rural life suits her better. At some point, she must decide what kind of life she wants: the difficult, dazzling path of a sports star, or the quieter, familiar comfort of staying among her own.

Shot in elegant black and white, Kairišs gradually unveils the surprising story of an athlete whose achievements, for anyone who looks them up, turn out to be staggering. The film, however, presents itself not as a conventional sports narrative but as an unusual coming-of-age story — the journey of a girl (tall, but deeply innocent) from a small religious community to the courts and the pressures of the Latvian, Soviet, and eventually world leagues. It never leans into her real-world fame. In its own quiet way, it is the origin story of an unlikely superhero: Ulya, the Latvian basketball player, the improbable sporting heroine of a nation.