Latvia’s Viesturs Kairiss Preps Follow-Up to Tribeca Winner ‘January’ (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comChristopher Vourlias Latvian director Viesturs Kairiss, who won the international narrative competition at the Tribeca Film Festival last year with his coming-of-age drama “January,” is prepping his next feature film. “Ulya” is based on the real-life story of Ulyana Semjonova, a girl raised in the Latvian countryside who reaches a height of seven feet and would go on to become a famous professional basketball player.
Set in the 1970s in Latvia, which was then part of the Soviet Union, the film follows its titular heroine from the time she leaves the countryside at the age of 14 and travels to Riga to play basketball.
Kairiss described that as a “crucial stage” in Semjonova’s life, as her body was undergoing dramatic — and traumatic — changes for a teenage girl, while she also began to learn how to overcome adversity and, through basketball, find her place in life.
Kairiss said the film was an homage to “a person with a different view of the world. A person whose language of emotion is peculiar and beautiful. “The film is simple and complicated, comic and tragic, epic and intimate, local and global,” the director added. “This won’t be a sports film.
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