Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead

By Daniel Nelson

Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead is a son's documentary about his dad. But what a dad!

It's like an extended home movie, except that most of it is filmed in Ukraine and Russia, as Stuart Urban accompanies his father, Garri, who is apparently trying to prove the truth of the exciting and mysterious stories he had recounted in his autobiography in 1980.

The stories include being shot while attempting to swim across an icy river in order to escape from the Soviet Union, a prison escape with the help of an officer's wife who was in love with him, torture by being tied in a straightjacket to a block of ice, and attempted suicide by biting his veins.

There's more - and there's more that's not known, or is contested. A Ukrainian security official, pressed to release Urbans communist-era file, says cryptically, "If your son knew what was in the file, his hair would stand on end."

Making the documentary provided further proof of Garri's chutzpah (audacity): when father and son are arrested while filming in Uzbekistan, he bluffs his way out by producing the phone number of the President - who he did not know.

The attempts to recover his file and to meet figures from the past are themselves fascinating. The most memorable sections include reunions, with a former lover, Noka (the two had not met since his arrest some half a century before) and with brother Menachem, who he had presumed was murdered in the Holocaust. Equally riveting is Menachem's story, told to camera, of how he shot the Ukrainian (and perhaps members of the man's family) who he believed had killed his sister at the end of the war as the Nazis pulled out.

And there's a disturbing reunion with the residents and neighbours of the Urbans' old house in Ukraine, with much toasting and singing and laughing. It's disturbing because of the suspicion that for some of the revellers conviviality is covering up past anti-semitism.

Amazingly, the film doesn't even mention other fascinating areas of Garri Urban's life, such as a spell as a doctor in a remote region of Venezuela and as a fully paid-up member of the Swinging Sixties in London, where he was a founder member of Tramps, a regular at Annabel's and a high roller at society poker games.

There's an interesting film to be made on how character manifests itself in different social settings: the bravado of a pugnacious, clever, fearless, charming, wilful, charismatic man clashes heroically with two of the twentieth century's defining ideologies - communism and fascism - and finds another outlet at the gaming table when a third ideology, capitalism, becomes rampant.

Yet another aspect of his colourful life was cited in the The Times obituary in 2004, which said Urban "pioneered one of the basic principles of international relief - that medical help must be freely given to all, no matter whether those in need belonged to the culprits or the victims to the disaster that preceded the relief work."

Though Stuart doesn't give much away on his feelings about his father, it's a personal and sometimes rather scrappy film. But it gives a human face to some of the seismic events of the mid-20th century - even though neither Stuart nor we will ever know the real story of his father's extraordinary life.

* Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead, 11-24 July, BFI Southbank, and Sunday 20 July, 1.45pm, Rio,107 Kingsland High Street, E8. Info: 7241 9410