Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead - Movie Blog.: “TOVARISCH, I AM NOT DEAD” WINS TOP PRIZE AT BIOGRAFILM, BOLOGNA

Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead.

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Thursday, 14 June 2007

“TOVARISCH, I AM NOT DEAD” WINS TOP PRIZE AT BIOGRAFILM, BOLOGNA

I am very pleased to return from the 3rd Biografilm festival of Bologna, Italy, with the Lancia Award, awarded at the closing ceremony on June 10th.

(story continues below image...)

The Lancia Award is given to the director of the film which in, in the view of the festival, marks the most outstanding achievement in this festival dedicated to celebrating human lives.

Although Biografilm is a newish event on the festival calendar, it has given the Italian or European premieres to films such as Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, Tarnation, KZ and works by Atom Egoyan, Paul Weitz, among others. There were 350 features entered, some of which had won awards at Tribeca, Amsterdam and other festivals.

There is something very emotional about receiving an award for such a personal topic, especially given the paradox that I could not really finish the film in the way I wanted while my father was alive, and therefore he could not be around to see this happen. I did feel that he was watching the award ceremony though, from somewhere.

Thanks so much to all those who helped so much in making the film and in supporting it!

4 comments:

Lynda Marks Kraar said...: My mother was always afraid of going back to Russia, fearing that she would be arrested for escaping the gulag. Are you screening in the States or Canada? I'd love to know.
Lynda aka GuitarGirl; 8 July 2007 at 12:54
Anonymous said...: Thanks, Lynda for your memory of your mother's feeling. Any more to share of her story on our history blog? We have upcoming screenings at Rhode Island Int'l Film Fest 9 August and in LA at Moondance, 7-9 September, MoMA in NYC sometime later this yr.; 24 July 2007 at 11:15
Anonymous said...: Good for people to know.; 12 November 2008 at 00:16
Anonymous said...: This is wonderful blog. I love it.; 24 February 2011 at 12:57

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Suggested Reading

Garri S. Urban: Tovarisch, I Am Not Dead This is the true and striking story by a Jewish doctor of his struggle for survival when caught in 1939 between the evils of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia. After facing death from frontier patrols, a firing squad and torture, Urban arrives at a position of considerable power in Soviet society in a medical post. He risks his life again, fighting epidemics. These fascinating memoirs give a very rare glimpse of the Soviet Union in wartime, particularly into the exotic life of the Moiscow elite, where beautiful women, diplomats and spies mingled at parties and sex was used as a method of recruiting agents. Compassionate to the sick, defiant to authority, Garri S Urban courage
Ruth Kluger: Landscape of Memory - a Holocaust Girlhood Remembered Ruth Kluger is one of the child-survivors of the Holocaust. In 1942 at the age of 11, she was deported to the Nazi "family camp" Theresienstadt with her mother. They would move to two other camps before the war ended. This book is the story of Ruth's life. Of a childhood spent in the nazi camps and her refusal to forget the past as an adult in America. Not erasing a single detail, not even the inconvienient ones, she writes frankly about the troubled relationship with her mother even through their years of internment and her determination not to forgive and absolve the past.
Sir Martin Gilbert: The Holocaust A very thorough account of the experience of the Jews of Europe during World War II. This title gives a virtual day-by-day account, in men and women's own words, of the horrifying events of the Holocaust - the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish race.
Anne Applebaum: Gulag The Pulitzer Prize winning narrative of the origins and development of the Soviet concentration camps. Based on archives, interviews and new research the book explains the role that the camps played in the Soviet political and economic system.
Richard Overy: Russia's War The astounding events of 1941-45 in which the Soviet Union, after initial catastrophes, destroyed Hitler's Third Reich and shaped European history for the next fifty years.
Willy Peter Reese: A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944 The haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead.
Slavomir Rawicz: The Long Walk The story of a young Polish cavalry officer who was arrested by the Russians, tortured and sentenced to 25 years forced labour. His escape and journey across the Gobi desert to Tibet and freedom.
Jean-Francois Steiner: Treblinka This is without a doubt one of the better books about the death camps. You will become intimately acquainted with Treblinka and the Nazis who ran it. Steiner's book is well-written and does justice to the horror.
Rodric Braithwaite: Moscow 1941Sunday Times review - ‘a wide-ranging and excellent account...Braithwaite never shirks the terrible truths

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