Tovarisch: I Am Not Dead (12A)
Friday, 2 May 2008
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Garri Urban, who died in 2004, was a Ukrainian Jew who dodged the Shoah only to end up in the gulag; he escaped, and ended up in England, living a conventional, middle-class life.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, his film-maker son accompanied him on a series of trips to the scenes of his youth, encountering some of the significant people in Garri's life – including the lover who was herself sentenced to a decade in the gulag on his account, but 50 years on clearly carries a torch for him.
The resulting documentary is an awkward patchwork, with longueurs and more questions raised than answered (is it possible that Urban was a spy? If so, for which side?); but it also has arresting moments – Stuart's aged uncle, seen in old photos as a cartoonishly weedy youth, describing how he gunned down the neighbours who murdered his family. It's engaging both as a portrait of the turbulence of life in the mid-20th century, and of the difficulty of being a father or a son.
