Is there any singular moment in our lives that is ever truly without meaning? In his debut feature film Ulysses, Japanese filmmaker Uwagawa Hikari seeks to find this out through seemingly random improvised sequence of events and discussions between a mother and her 8 year-old son, an impromptu Christmas dinner party, a San Sebastián cathedral, and a the traditional Japanese ancestral ritual to bid farewell to a loved one.
Much like its literary namesake “Ulysses” the 1922 novel by Irish author James Joyce, Uwagawa’s interpretation is comprised of a series of brief glimpses in the lives of people he grew to know while attending film school in Spain. In Madrid, Spain, there’s Aliftina, a woman who though married, has become a single mother to her son Dimitri due to her husband’s years long absence. When told by her that his father has gone off to make a fortune for them, Dimitri with the unvarnished wisdom of a child, responds by telling his mother not to expect only good things in life because life is unpredictable. Leading her to ponder that perhaps her son sees and understands more than she thinks.
At a small gathering in their apartment to celebrate Christmas, two of Aliftina’s friends begin to dance arm-in-arm with each other. The two men show a sense of joy in enjoying this brief moment of spontaneous intimacy that creates a bubble of respite from whatever uncertainty may exist outside the walls of the small apartment. Uwagawa’s method of filmmaking gives these completely improvisational sequences and those that follow it in the 74 minute film a sort of “fly on the wall” perspective in the vein of an observational documentary.
At a non-descript park in San Sebastián, a woman, Enaitz and her acquaintance Ichii, drive aimlessly through rain soaked streets discussing the ways people have to push through their own personal comfort zones to make friends. Later, on a sunny day they sit on a park bench in a nondescript playground sharing a book written in Spanish that they translate to each other in English and Japanese. It’s at this juncture in Ulysses, that Uwagawa’s journey to becoming more sure of himself as a filmmaker begins to make headway.
In the candlelit cavernous interior of a Spanish cathedral, the camera pulls back and follows Ichii making his way through the wooden pews, like a spectre watching a hero enter into a new stage of an adventure. Cinematographers Avery Duncan and Keisuke Sekino do a beautiful job of giving more visual depth and this sequence shows how they themselves grow along with Uwagawa in the creative process.
In Japan, an elderly lady and her daughter make preparations to perform Obon to honor the passing of their husband and father. They talk about various memories they shared as a family. Moments that took time to create but pass by as quickly as the moment in which their spoken passes. And into the frame comes an unknown man with shoulder length black hair who continues the preparation process, and unless you’ve seen his picture you won’t know that it’s Uwagawa himself who’s taken himself from the relative anonymity of working behind the screen into his own on-screen narrative. The author has become the subject. And thus begins another chapter in Ulysses’s story.
Premiering in the International Competition program of the 2025 Jeonju International Film Festival, Ulysses began as Uwagawa waiting to experiment with his filmmaking style and wanting to see where a story with no defined script could go. Out of this curiosity came a film where a filmmaker unintentionally learns his limitations and observes his own evolution from someone feeling like an outsider, to figuring out that the art of crafting a film provides unexpected opportunities for insights and interpretations of the small individual moments that make up the human experience. Including his own.
In my interview with Hikaru we spoke of how Hikaru’s struggles to fit in at film school in Spain created unexpected challenges in him figuring out the language of filmmaking in both a literal and metaphorical sense, how using the unique sentence structure of Japanese Haiku inspired his first ever short film which serendipitously ended up being the template upon which he would build the narrative structure of Ulysses and ultimately his confidence as a director.
Carolyn Hinds
Freelance Film Critic, Journalist, Podcaster & YouTuber
African American Film Critics Association Member, Tomatometer-Approved Critic
Host & Producer Carolyn Talks…, and So Here’s What Happened! Podcast
Bylines at Authory.com/CarolynHinds
Twitter & Instagram: @CarrieCnh12
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