For Swedish filmmaker Ragnhild Ekner, the stadium was never just a venue for sport; it was a sanctuary. In her latest documentary, Ultras, Ekner explores the hyper-organized, intensely loyal subculture of football's most devoted supporters — a global phenomenon that has shaped the culture of the game far more than most casual viewers realize. The project is deeply personal, born from the aftermath of a close friend's suicide, an event previously explored in her earlier work The Traffic Lights Turn Blue Tomorrow. For Ekner and many of her subjects, the collective roar of the stands served as a vital counterweight to the isolation of grief.
The ultra movement, which traces its roots to Italian football terraces in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has since spread to virtually every continent where the sport is played. The term "ultra" broadly refers to the most organized and passionate faction within a club's supporter base — groups that choreograph large-scale displays known as tifos, coordinate chants for the full duration of a match, and treat attendance not as leisure but as obligation. Unlike casual fandom, ultra culture demands participation. It is structured, hierarchical, and often self-financed, operating outside the commercial apparatus of modern football.
Grief as a Gateway to the Crowd
Ekner's entry point into this world is not tactical or sociological but emotional. By anchoring the film in personal loss, she sidesteps the familiar framing of ultras as either romantic rebels or dangerous hooligans. Instead, the documentary poses a quieter question: what draws a person toward the overwhelming sensory experience of the stands at a moment of profound vulnerability?
The film eschews the detached perspective of traditional sports journalism for a more lyrical, immersive approach. Using a blend of global field recordings and archival footage, Ekner captures the sensory overload of the ultra experience — the thick haze of flares, the rhythmic chanting, and the crushing proximity of the crowd. Through slow-motion sequences and tight close-ups, she translates the abstract concept of fanaticism into a tangible, almost tactile study of human connection. The effect is closer to ethnographic cinema than to sports documentary, recalling the observational patience of filmmakers who embed themselves in subcultures rather than narrate them from outside.
This approach carries risks. Without a conventional narrative spine — no single club, no season arc, no central protagonist beyond Ekner herself — the film relies on accumulation rather than plot. Whether that accumulation produces insight or repetition likely depends on the viewer's tolerance for impressionistic documentary form.
The Stadium as Contested Space
Where Ultras gains its sharpest edge is in its implicit argument about public space. Modern football has undergone decades of commercialization, a process that accelerated after the tragedies at Heysel and Hillsborough led to sweeping stadium reforms across Europe. All-seater stadiums, rising ticket prices, and corporate hospitality suites have gradually reshaped who occupies the stands and how they behave. Ultra groups have frequently positioned themselves in opposition to this trajectory, viewing the terrace as a space that should belong to the community rather than to broadcasters and sponsors.
Ekner captures this tension through a telling anecdote: a young girl who rejects the sterile safety of the VIP section to be closer to the perceived danger of the stands. The moment crystallizes the film's central thesis — that the appeal of ultra culture is not violence for its own sake but the experience of collective intensity in a world that has steadily sanitized public gathering. The stadium, in this reading, becomes one of the last arenas where unmediated, physical togetherness is not only permitted but encouraged.
While the documentary acknowledges the darker edges of the movement — the mass organization required for these displays can and does bleed into hooliganism, territorial conflict, and political extremism — it does not dwell there. This is a deliberate editorial choice, and one that some viewers may find incomplete. The line between communal devotion and organized aggression is not always as clean as the film's lyrical register suggests.
What remains after the final frame is a productive tension rather than a resolution. Ekner presents the ultra phenomenon as simultaneously a form of mourning, a political act, and a primal need for belonging — without insisting that any single reading is sufficient. The question the film leaves open is whether institutions that govern football, and public life more broadly, can accommodate that need or will continue to engineer it out of existence.
With reporting from Little White Lies.
Source · Little White Lies
