THE STORY – Follows a man who confronts his past through extreme endurance challenges.
THE CAST – Tiberiu Ușeriu, Alin Uhlmann Ușeriu, Maria Mihaela Ștefănuț, David Ușeriu, Eftina Moeșan & Ana Szekely
THE TEAM – Mila Aung-Thwin (Director/Writer) & Mike MacMillan (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 98 Minutes
We meet Tiberiu Uşeriu, the subject of Mila Aung-Thwin’s stunning new documentary “The Ultra Runner,” as he’s preparing for what appears to be an impossible journey. Setting out along the temporary ice roads from Canada’s Yukon, weaving for 100s of kilometers through towards the Northwest Territories, this is a journey of endurance, tenacity, obsession, and more than a little bit of madness. More than a mere portrait of a sportsman engaged in the extremes of physical activity, “The Ultra Runner” is a psychological dive into one man’s quest for redemption, illuminating on the scars of both his youth and the country of his birth. Uşeriu is not simply the man we see bedecked in winter wear, huffing away on snow-covered paths, dragging a sled with his provisions like some sort of pack animal. He’s also an avatar for all that Romania has experienced over the last half century, a land of paradoxical freedoms and oppressions, liberations and criminality.
Running in such extreme conditions is not merely an exercise in masochism, though it is most certainly that as evidenced by the sheer exhaustion we witness. The vicarious view of a smiling Uşeriu ripping off his big toe’s nail and showing it off to rapt Inuit
school children may be one of the more glaring moments, but as a visual metaphor for picking at wounds to confront the cause of the pain, it is an apt one. Uşeriu admits to hallucinations during his runs, a common occurrence when the body is stretched so thin, and this provides the film with the perfect mechanism to discuss his complicated past. From a childhood riddled with physical and psychological abuse from an overbearing father, through to a complicated relationship with a sibling riven from his brother in a nasty divorce, right through to a chance encounter at a border leading to a life of crime and violence, these vignettes complicate the runner’s story, making him both more dimensional, and unabashedly unsympathetic when necessary.
Aung-Thwin does well to interweave these elements, making up for the repetitive, but of course intensely beautiful, visuals of a man pounding the ground, step after step, trying to reach the arbitrary end of the path carved through the wilderness. Just as Uşeriu drags along his hastily assembled sled, the baggage of his own life is never far between, and it’s not hard to see the many ways that notions of running away, of escape, of self- flagellation, and even of the very notion of fighting to survive insane situations while holding onto one’s sanity, are all at play on those cold, dark journeys. From craggy cliffs to snowy landscapes illuminated by the green glow of the beautiful borealis, Aung-Thwin’s film does allow us as the audience to experience these locations with the comfort of a warm environment and access to sufficient rest. The voyeuristic, near sadistic element of watching a man suffer is certainly at play here, yet it’s the welcome contextualization of not only the man’s journey, but his past, that elevates what easily could have simply been one among many inferior sports films. Instead, we have something that, while it doesn’t always race to the finish line with pace, occasionally losing the path along the way, does manage to bring us along in
impressive fashion as Uşeriu navigates where he has been and where he’s heading as a father, a husband, and athlete alike.
“The Ultra Runner” is the ultimate vision of a man running away from what tries to keep him constrained. And while not every integration of recreated elements and newly shot footage incorporates as seamlessly as one would hope, and the wider poetic elements do at times lose their way, there’s so much to admire about Aung-Thwin’s film that even these few missteps
pale compared to the many that land firmly on the unsettled ground of a man, his country, his past, and the future that lays ahead.
