At the time of writing, Tovarisch has participated at some twenty or so international film festivals, picking up half a dozen awards and several nominations, including the British Independent Film Awards.
Below are a sample of 10 months of festival-hopping.
Monday, 14 April 2008
Sunday, 24 February 2008
PUNTO de VISTA DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL, PAMPLONA, SPAIN
Punto de Vista - credit to Luis Dias
Although Pamplona is slightly better know for its running bulls than its cutting edge new documentary festival, I call upon everyone who loves animals to flock to the city for the film event and thereby save the lives of those frightened beasts who are sacrificed each summer (and the odd drunken tourist whom they gore now and then). Hopefully we can make the Pamplona film run the hot ticket event.
Dana and I had a lovely sojourn during this impeccably-managed event in the old city. I was touched, and should not have been surprised as a historian, by the fact that Spanish and Basque people take to the film because they know all too well the horrible legacy of totalitarian terror in the last century in their civil war and Franco’s repression. I guess this is why the film won the Audience Award (Premio del Publico)
This town has almost no Jewish population, but in another moving moment, two middle-aged Jewish brothers come over after the show.Their father only survived the war by an irony – a volunteer for the Republican forces from France, he was incarcerated by the Fascists in a Spanish prison camp, thus surviving the war. Franco did not send Jews back to the Nazis, unlike the occupied French.
Find out more about the festival
Saturday, 8 December 2007
JERUSALEM JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL and TEL-AVIV CINEMATHEQUE
Stuart & Yehuda Efroni at Tel Aviv Cinematheque
To Jerusalem for the film’s premiere in Israel and my wife Dana’s 50th birthday party, with close family in attendance. A heady mixture in the Holy City! It turns out to be one of the best and rewarding weeks I can ever remember, including a couple of days off at the Dead Sea and a standing room only showing of the film at the Tel-Aviv Cinematheque attended by 450 people. What matters most to me is that my uncle Menachem is with us, 81 and still playing tennis, 60 years after being gravely wounded defending a besieged enclave in Jerusalem.
Upon arriving in Israel, we are whisked through formalities by a culture ministry official and greeted also by a major article in The Jerusalem Post
Actors Topol and Yehuda Efroni help celebrate the film at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque with great pzazz, as they both knew Garri. Topol lights the candles for the hannukah festival on stage and sings in his famous voice, then making a speech before the film. My cousin Chasia also gives invaluable support in assuring this amazing turnout and catering.
Topol before the show with me
What makes touring with this film so special is the following event: an elderly but sprightly man comes out of the crowd. Zvi Halpern, an artist and veteran kibbutznik, explains that as a boy he escaped on the last day of the liquidation of the ghetto in the town that he and my father came from. Joining the partisans, he survived the war, and just like my uncle Menachem from the same town, got to Palestine and joined the Palmach (Jewish special forces).
Stuart & Menachem
Thursday, 29 November 2007
BRITISH INDEPENDENT FILM AWARDS 28 November 2007
At the British Independent Film Awards
My how the event has grown. What used to be an upstart to the Baftas in the manner of the Independent Spirit Awards bearding the Oscars, the Bifas now constitute a very glitzy night out for celeb-spotters and freeloaders. The bash at the London Roundhouse was very well staged and even the food was good.
As Daniel Craig’s citation for the Variety Award played in speech and on the big screens, it was heart-warming to see the young man I had cast when directing the BBC’s Our Friends In The North scale the heights.
We were up for the Raindance Award, which is given to a film that played to a sellout screening at the Raindance festival and which had been against all the odds on a low budget. We lost to The Inheritance, made by a guy scarcely out of his teens who reminded me of myself 30 years ago, turning out a film on a sixpence with bags of chutzpah.
Well, after some years in awards wilderness it was good to be back at the table!
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
Warsaw International Jewish Film Festival November 2007
Warsaw - November 2007
Did you hear the one about the East European capital with scarcely any Jews, but two rival Jewish film festivals? That would be Warsaw.
Both invited my film on an exclusive basis, offering travel, hospitality for me and a guest etc.
By the time my wife and I arrive at the A festival, it has been all but crushed by budget cuts forced through litigation with the B Festival. The former B festival seems to have walked off with the state funding. Our host event now seems to be diving to Z status as our “hotel invitation” reverts to a futon bed on the floor of a flat belong to the harassed fest director’s girlfriend, in the outskirts of Warsaw. The festival cannot even afford to ship 35mm prints, with the result that films are shown in awful quality off DVD. I feel very sorry for them. And for us: Z-land for a week, with vouchers just for a sandwich and a coffee a day. It’s grim out East. Leaving the closing night dinner to which we were all specifically invited, we are all asked to pay our (hefty) share.
But as the first winter snow comes down, something magic began to happen. I encounter the most amazing band of Polish people who are not Jewish but who are helping to keep alive the flame of Jewish culture all but extinguished by Nazism and Communism. See my newspaper article in the JC
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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
Suggested Films
Schindlers List
The 2004 release telling the true stroy of Schindlers attempts to save Jewish workers from the horrors of the German camps....
The Story Of The Gulag Runaway
In Stalinist Russia, Chabua Amiredjibi endured years of imprisonment, backbreaking punishment, horrific torture, and two death sentences. But his broken life and ill health did not kill his hope of gaining freedom. In all, he managed six escapes from Stalin's Gulag Camps. He stood up, fought and survived.
The 2004 release telling the true stroy of Schindlers attempts to save Jewish workers from the horrors of the German camps....
The Story Of The Gulag Runaway
In Stalinist Russia, Chabua Amiredjibi endured years of imprisonment, backbreaking punishment, horrific torture, and two death sentences. But his broken life and ill health did not kill his hope of gaining freedom. In all, he managed six escapes from Stalin's Gulag Camps. He stood up, fought and survived.