Ulrica

Synopsis

A wartime submariner escapes his sinking vessel and descends into ocean’s depths, pursued by a low-frequency pulse he associates with the rumoured enemy craft known as Ulrica. As he hides among caves and ruins, time fractures: ancient shipwreck surfaces, and memories from different centuries bleed into one another. The sea becomes a liminal archive, transforming a soldier’s flight into an encounter with the forgotten and the unknowable.

Statement

Water embodies a profoundly ambivalent force for me — maternal and abyssal, purifying and destabilising. Precisely because it holds these contradictions simultaneously, it becomes a multidimensional model: a means of simulating altered states of consciousness, a framework for sensory inquiry, and a medium through which trauma healing and meditation can be imagined. Ulrica is conceived to bring this conscious, sensorial, and spiritual “threshold-crossing” onto shore into a theatrical environment. These qualities have deepened through my practice as a technical diver. Underwater, sound travels at more than four times the speed it does in air, and water’s density favours low frequencies, producing an enveloping, womb-like acoustic field. Underwater vision, meanwhile, collapses familiar perception: refraction distorts scale, and much of the colour spectrum is absorbed. Water also functions as a carrier of memory and history. Under conditions of slow decay, the ocean preserves undocumented traces of the past: shipwrecks, ruins, and remains. On a planetary scale, it also bears silent witness to tectonic shifts and the assorbitlong arc of species evolution. Ulrica stages this “forgotten centre” as a dramatic site: a space where humans re-enter communion with other forms of life, and connection with trauma and ancestrality is reestablished. By encountering water as a reservoir of emotion and deep time, Ulrica offers an environmental call that does not reiterate ecological crisis, but opens a felt recognition of the world as a shared Eden.

Credits

Director

Hongbo Cai

Production

Some Studio LLC, Good Company, Yinxu Zhou, Ryan Heiferman, Xtreme Dive Centers, Master Liveaboard, Elsa Huang

Running Time

20'

Language

English

Country

USA, Mexico, Micronesia

Main Cast

Francisco M. Ponce Gil, John Blake, Bolditzár Kovács, Ziyi Tao, Hongbo Cai

Screenplay

Hongbo Cai

Editor

Hongbo Cai, Juliette Ho, Weiying Jin

Music

Ziyi Tao

Sound

Carol Yan Li, Ziyi Tao, Nathan Prillamen

Art directors

Victoria Gong, Hongbo Cai, Zicong Wang, Laurence Huo

Lead developer

Xiucheng Pei

Designer

Yang Tan