One way to Mars

ABOUT

ABOUT THE FILM

About the Film In 1982, Ulymar, a South Korean man who believed himself to be a god from Mars, made headlines after announcing his marriage to Miss France. Then, somewhere along the way, he disappeared. What first drew me in was his extraordinary love story, but the deeper I looked, the more fascinated I became by his unwavering belief that a UFO would one day take him back to Mars. What began as a search through a few newspaper archives grew into a years-long journey across countries. By the time I found him, Ulymar had died in Paris just a week before we arrived. But there was more to discover. Ulymar had also been an artist, leaving behind hundreds of paintings, sketches, and pages of writing. Faced with piles of his mysterious artwork to be deciphered and an urn of his unclaimed ashes, I became determined to find a way to send him back to Mars. “One Way to Mars” follows this peculiar journey, exploring the strange responsibility we sometimes assume for people we've never really known, and what becomes of a dream after its dreamer is gone.

ULYMAR

From Ulymar’s journal People may think they have the world under control, keeping helpless animals locked up in zoos, looking down on them with amusement. But to the gods watching from high above, might human society itself be nothing more than a cramped zoo?

Who is Ulymar? Born in 1950, Ulymar left school at sixteen, consumed by an extraordinary conviction that he was a god from Mars, stranded on Earth and destined to return home one day by UFO. In 1982, he briefly became a public sensation after announcing his marriage to Miss France. But the attention eventually faded, and Ulymar slipped out of public view, leaving behind a life that is difficult to trace. Away from the headlines, he had been quietly building a world of his own. He was a prolific artist, filling notebooks with poetry, essays, personal accounts, and elaborate tales of life beyond Earth, while producing paintings and drawings that moved between ethereal and rigid styles. His writings and artwork offer glimpses into an imagination that seemed to blur the line between lived experience and fantasy. Much of Ulymar's life remains elusive. Yet perhaps the most intriguing thing about him was not simply that he believed he came from Mars, but the absolute conviction with which he insisted that Earth was never his home.