Ula

Urszula Dudziak – better known as Ula – is just a teenager in the Polish countryside when she hears jazz for the first time. Luckily, this music from the United States made it through the Iron Curtain that separated the Western bloc from the Soviet Eastern bloc. For Ula, it means a revelation as well as the discovery of a vocation. Her voice becomes her instrument and, after being noticed, she moves to Warsaw to pursue her artistic career. Little does she know that this is only the beginning.

Shortly afterwards, when her partner at the time, also a musician, is offered the opportunity to move to the United States, he invites Ula to follow him. This propels her to the forefront of the New York jazz scene in the 1970s, where she begins to sing freely alongside some of the biggest names of the time including Stan Getz, Jaco Pastorius and Archie Shepp. But the fantasy of an artist's life in a thriving creative city soon collides with a very different reality...

Using Super 8 archive footage of her journey, the artist herself takes us behind the scenes of an often-dreamt-of era and of her emancipation as an artist but also as an immigrant woman.