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Film Screening & Discussion: "Tovarisch: I'm Not Dead"
FC1002
| TUE |
| 27 |
| MAY |
With Film Director Stuart Urban
7.30pm, in the Phoenix Theatre at Ivy House
Garri Urban was a survivor 'not a victim' of both the Holocaust and Gulag. Born in the shtetl (the Jewish rural community) in 1916, he overcame adversity through a mixture of charm, aggression, and chutzpah. His 1980 autobiographical account of his adventures took its title from when he was shot during his attempt to swim across an icy river from Soviet territory to Romania. He told the snipers who stooped to lift his apparently lifeless body; no, tovarisch (comrade), I'm not dead' before striking their officer.
In 1992 his son, film-maker Stuart Urban, follows Garri into the former Soviet Union as soon as Communism disintegrates.
The video diaries that were made over a 14 year quest into Garri's KGB records and the fate of his family in the Holocaust, plus extensive 16mm Kodachrome home movies from the 1950s onwards, form the core of the film, by two-time British Academy award winning director Stuart.
Stuart Urban , born in the UK in 1958 has been a film maker for over 25 years. His work includes highly regarded, award winning popular TV dramas and movies that have sold around the world, winning him two British Academy (and other) awards.
Aged 13, Stuart had his first film shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The Virus of War was a thirty-minute 16mm drama about a fascist outpost on some British Islands in the Atlantic. It is preserved in the National Film Archive. After graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first in Modern History, Stuart worked as writer, director and producer. His first feature-length BBC drama, An Ungentlemanly Act, dramatising the first 36 hours of the Falklands War starring Ian Richardson and Bob Peck, won a British Academy award as Best Single Drama and many international awards.
Since then his list of credits includes; directing Our Friends in the North, the most successful drama for 15 years on BBC2, which was voted one of the Top 25 Television Programmes Of All Time in the influential British Film Institute Poll of 2000; writing the $6 million HBO/BBC film Deadly Voyage that won the Silver Nymph for Best Screenplay at Monte; writing, producing and directing cult comedy Preaching to the Perverted, theatrically released in 23 countries and in 1999, being chosen by Harold Pinter to co-write, produce and direct Against the War, an acclaimed and hard-hitting documentary attacking the NATO bombing of Serbia for the BBC.
More recently he has co-produced, written and directed Revelation a Cyclops Vision Production for Romulus Films. This mystical/supernatural thriller starring Terence Stamp and Udo Kier concerns the quest to locate and understand a relic that heralds the fusion of science and religion. He has also directed extensively in factual television, most recently for BBC�s flagship current affairs slot, Panorama, where he did the influential 2005 edition entitled Blair v Blair which covered civil liberties and terrorism.
The Jewish Chronicle - 24th Jan '08
"One thing not to miss..."
"Sometimes people hear about Tovarisch and 'they say, 'Not another Holocaust film.' Then they are amazed, it is not a catalog of massacres and suffering. It is as much about triumph and the strength of personality.'
The film is 'a testament, but not an unquestioning testament to what my father endured and survived'."
7.30pm, in the Phoenix Theatre at Ivy House
Garri Urban was a survivor 'not a victim' of both the Holocaust and Gulag. Born in the shtetl (the Jewish rural community) in 1916, he overcame adversity through a mixture of charm, aggression, and chutzpah. His 1980 autobiographical account of his adventures took its title from when he was shot during his attempt to swim across an icy river from Soviet territory to Romania. He told the snipers who stooped to lift his apparently lifeless body; no, tovarisch (comrade), I'm not dead' before striking their officer.
In 1992 his son, film-maker Stuart Urban, follows Garri into the former Soviet Union as soon as Communism disintegrates.
The video diaries that were made over a 14 year quest into Garri's KGB records and the fate of his family in the Holocaust, plus extensive 16mm Kodachrome home movies from the 1950s onwards, form the core of the film, by two-time British Academy award winning director Stuart.
Stuart Urban , born in the UK in 1958 has been a film maker for over 25 years. His work includes highly regarded, award winning popular TV dramas and movies that have sold around the world, winning him two British Academy (and other) awards.
Aged 13, Stuart had his first film shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The Virus of War was a thirty-minute 16mm drama about a fascist outpost on some British Islands in the Atlantic. It is preserved in the National Film Archive. After graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first in Modern History, Stuart worked as writer, director and producer. His first feature-length BBC drama, An Ungentlemanly Act, dramatising the first 36 hours of the Falklands War starring Ian Richardson and Bob Peck, won a British Academy award as Best Single Drama and many international awards.
Since then his list of credits includes; directing Our Friends in the North, the most successful drama for 15 years on BBC2, which was voted one of the Top 25 Television Programmes Of All Time in the influential British Film Institute Poll of 2000; writing the $6 million HBO/BBC film Deadly Voyage that won the Silver Nymph for Best Screenplay at Monte; writing, producing and directing cult comedy Preaching to the Perverted, theatrically released in 23 countries and in 1999, being chosen by Harold Pinter to co-write, produce and direct Against the War, an acclaimed and hard-hitting documentary attacking the NATO bombing of Serbia for the BBC.
More recently he has co-produced, written and directed Revelation a Cyclops Vision Production for Romulus Films. This mystical/supernatural thriller starring Terence Stamp and Udo Kier concerns the quest to locate and understand a relic that heralds the fusion of science and religion. He has also directed extensively in factual television, most recently for BBC�s flagship current affairs slot, Panorama, where he did the influential 2005 edition entitled Blair v Blair which covered civil liberties and terrorism.
The Jewish Chronicle - 24th Jan '08
"One thing not to miss..."
"Sometimes people hear about Tovarisch and 'they say, 'Not another Holocaust film.' Then they are amazed, it is not a catalog of massacres and suffering. It is as much about triumph and the strength of personality.'
The film is 'a testament, but not an unquestioning testament to what my father endured and survived'."