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TOVARISCH I AM NOT DEAD

By Stuart URBAN

VECTIS VISION LTD - as PROD

Documentary - Completed 2007

- Year of production
- 2007
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- UNITED KINGDOM
- Languages
- ENGLISH, RUSSIAN
- Duration
- 83 mn
- Director(s)
- Stuart URBAN
- Writer(s)
- Stuart URBAN
- Synopsis
- Garri Urban was a survivor – not a victim – of both the Holocaust and Gulag. When he published his astonishing account of his experiences, not everyone believed he successfully escaped from these twin evils. Armed only with his indomitable will power and chutzpah, Garri set out on a remarkable journey of proof, trauma and reunion, resurrecting painful memories, opening old wounds, revealing shocking secrets.
  In 1992 Stuart Urban, a two-time BAFTA winner, followed his father into the former Soviet Union. The video diaries he made over a 14 year quest into Garri’s KGB records and the fate of his family in the Holocaust, plus extensive home movies, form the core of this film. They discover that Garri is still wanted as an “international spy”! When eventually they track down his KGB file, details are kept back which, Stuart is told, “would make his hair stand on end” if only he knew this about his father … Stuart closely questions Garri while he is alive, and when he dies goes in search of answers he could not get until his father was dead. After death, Garri proves to be even more enigmatic - a KGB special agent? Revelations from the Holocaust and the family’s revenge are no less dramatic.
  Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead is not a standard biographical documentary but a probing analysis of identity: a mystery tour presenting fresh surprises and twists of the tale with every unfolding chapter in a road movie like no other.
  Everyone has, or had, a father, and can relate to this quest. But how many fathers’ lives were so extreme, so mysterious, and so eventful?