ULYSSES

Drifting Through Memory, Place and Time

Venue(s): Stranger
August 31 (Sun), 2025: 19:20 and September 2 (Tue), 2025: 21:00
Language: Russian, Spanish, Basque, English, Japanese
Official website: ulyssesfilm.studio.site/
Theater website: stranger.jp/theater/?anchor=access
Theater website: stranger.jp/movie/7491/
Trailer: https://youtu.be/Xzr3a4t-xzM?feature=shared
Tariff: General: ￥1,800 / Koto, Sumida/Koto residences, workers, students: ¥1,500 / Under 26, or over 59: ￥1,300 / Under 19:¥1,000.
Advance tickets: stranger.jp/?anchor=screen

Title: ユリシーズ (Ulysses)
Director: Hikaru Uwagawa (宇和川輝)
Duration: 73 min

After traveling for nearly a year on the international film circuit, Hikaru Uwagawa’s debut feature, Ulysses, is being screened once again in Tokyo, with English subtitles. Uwagawa is the first Japanese filmmaker to graduate from the Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola film school in San Sebastián, Spain, and his debut has already impressed audiences at the FID Marseille Film Festival, San Sebastián Film Festival, Tokyo FILMeX, and Jeonju Film Festival.

Inspired not by plot but by the spirit of Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses, the contemplative work weaves together three distinct stories across time and place. In Madrid, a Russian woman, Alevtina, raises her son while waiting for her partner’s return. In the Basque seaside town of San Sebastián, Enaitz—a young local woman—shares her world with Izumi, a reserved Japanese traveler. And in Okayama, Japan, Kazuko and her grandson Hikaru prepare to welcome ancestral spirits during Obon.

Each story, quiet and observational, touches on themes of absence and connection, as well as identity. Uwagawa, who also served as cinematographer and editor, has called the film “a kind of personal archive”—a meditation on why we create, and how film becomes a vessel for memory. Using long takes, natural light, and sparse dialogue, Ulysses invites the viewer to drift between both physical and emotional terrains.

Stranger