You know, he had just got out of the KGB, or what was the Uzbek security service now, what was the KGB building in Tashkent.. and he said to the camera; “I am doing this all for you.” He could have maybe not have got out, he could have said it because he was feeling incredibly sick and fed up with people. They were interesting observations made “on the road” about the very process of making a film that just exposes us to… if not dangers, certainly deep stress. You know it is very tough to go to a cemetery where hundreds, certainly maybe tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. He knew his family had been killed there, that they had all disappeared from the camp at that time. Bullet holes in the grave – it is all very stressful -- and bones sticking out of the earth.

Stuart Urban
Director. Tovarisch I am Not Dead

When he was a 14-year old Shooter, Stuart Urban played at war and filmed it taking inspiration from his own father’s war experiences, escaping first the Nazi holocaust and then, the Soviet gulag system. Stuart little realised then, how years later he would travel to film his father’s story: in the places where he was tortured, where his family was butchered, meet the woman his father loved, who sheltered him, and uncover many disturbing secrets in trying to discover just who was this man, the man that was his father.
The resulting documentary Tovarisch I Am Not Dead took over 14 years to make, travelling in some very dangerous places, being arrested by secret police, uncovering many very dark places and even darker deeds that happened in them. The film is the Raindance nomination for a BIFA award and is an extremely moving investigation into one man’s life under two oppressive systems. It is a life that raises almost as many questions as it answers, about the hidden worlds of cross-border traffic and international espionage during the Second World War and the Cold War, that may well continue to this very day.

You made your first film The Virus of War when you were 13 in 1972, featuring children playing at war. What was it about?I suppose it was in no small measure due to the fact that my brother had found out he was two years younger. Then we had found out some of what had transpired for my fathers family, who were mostly killed in the holocaust. His brother, who had survived, became an underground fighter with the Jewish resistance and this impacted on us. We were always doing shows, plays and music, I suppose trying to refine our skills and do something constructive. The idea formed, with our friends, to try and make a war film; kids playing Nazis. It wasnt so much about a war, but these Nazis invaded some British islands in the South Atlantic. It was actually the Falkland Islands, though I never realised it at the time! [Both Laugh.] Looking back I suppose we were just working through some of the things that had happened to my father, in a sense.It caused a bit of a stir at Cannes, didnt it?Yes, it was at Cannes, it was sold to many countries. I would like to think it was because it was such a good film but it may have been just as much because of my fathers salesmanship skills. He would go into PBS in America and say I vill not leave until you haf bought my sons film! and make them run it. So he was quite a ruthless man...He wouldnt take no for an answer, put it that way! He did get some sales, to major networks around the world. I wish it were that easy today to go out and sell my films.Has war and political conflict continued to interest you as a film subject?It has, though not all my work has been about conflict. My brother is a war correspondent; he just missed the Benazir Bhutto bomb actually. He travelled back with her to Pakistan for the BBC Newsnight job that he does. So I supopose I have been quite interested in that professionally, but I have also done a lot of other subjects as well, including TV drama and comedy and totally different subjects, though I do keep returning to it somehow.

Your father was born where? And what happened to him before he finally settled in London?He was born in Eastern Galicea and at the time he was born in 1916 it was still in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and it was then Poland. It is now in Ukraine. So the place has changed hand four times in the last 100 years. At the beginning of the Second World War, beginning with the Nazi invasion of Poland he was in Warsaw, he was not in his home area at that time. He escaped through the Nazi lines and go to the Soviet side, where the Soviets had invaded Poland from the East, including Eastern Galicea. So that was the beginning of the war for him and trying to escape from the Russians he was captured and sent to the Gulag. He then went through a series of helter skelter rides really, of the worst and the best of the Soviet system. He went through several prisons and escapes and he even had a death sentence pronounced, but he was also at one point quite high up in organising health as a doctor and head of health for a whole big district and used the influence of that position partly to get him the connections to escape the Soviet Union. He then worked in Venezuela as a doctor and eventually came to England, having retired from medicine and brought us up here as a family, my brother and I.Have you always been aware of the fact that he had led such an unusual life?I think it became apparent when we were old enough to understand. I think we were mabe nine, ten, but I dont remember the exact moment, but I do remember the moment he found the only survivor of his family. I still remember that; when I was six or so. The telegram arrived from Israel that a brother, a brother had survived because he didnt know from all his brothers and sisters in this big family who might have survived. He thought they were all dead. The telegram arrive and in the telegram the sender named the mothers pet-names for each of the brothers and sisters. It was a big moment. They were all the correct names. My father grabbed his suitcase and went on the next plane. Wonderful. What an astonishing thing to have happen. Well, when did you decide you wanted to make a film about your father?I suppose, I was always wanting to be a filmmaker. I was always wanting to make a movie about my dad. When I say a movie, a documentary is as much of a movie as is a drama, but I wanted to make a dramatised film. I realised that this enterprise would be such a big budget. But it is still something that I want to make. I had wanted to do this from probably the time his book (Tovarisch I Am Not Dead by Garri S Urban) came out when I was about twenty, wanting to be a filmmaker and wanting to make a movie of it. Obviously being a junior filmmaker, it wasnt really a possibility to make such a big scale film. And then I had done a couple of TV dramas, big TV dramas and started to do feature films as a director and I have always wanted to do it. I have had various actors interested in it to play him and his former fiance I had Liv Tyler interested in that role - but I never really found the right person to play him somehow at the right age and who really wanted to do it. So I thought well, to hell with this, why dont I put together a documentary about him, because I had filmed all my researches and travels with him and all these amazing places where he was imprisoned and tortured or escaped, or shot. And where there were joyous events as well as battles, where he had enjoyed his childhood. So I thought maybe I can make it into a documentary when I have found out more about my father. His life was very mysterious in many respects. It was very apparent to me that although he had written a book about himself a best seller in many countries a great book in many respects, but it left a great many questions unanswered. There was no official version of what happened to him I had to delve deeper myself. So when you announced this to him that you would like to make film about him how did he feel about that?He had mixed views. My brother and I in growing up. You know he was a very demanding, pushy father in some respects. Always expecting the highest standards in everything. We had to get top marks. We had to get this we had to get into good universities: we had to get First Class degrees. All this pressure was always on us, but equally he often would do us down at other times. He was ambivalent about whether I should make a film about him, as in a movie movie, because there was some interest at various times from various well known I mean Costa Gavros was at one point interested in the book. Other people were interested, but it never came to anything. Obviously to get a film made there has to be a passionate interest from the producer and the director to get it made. You could always send a copy of your documentary to Harvey Weinstein...Yea, Well, I could probably send one, but I dont know if it would ever get to him.He was ambivalent... Oh, Yea, and the other guy who was interested was Andre Kontralovski... and then I got development money from first, the BBC at BBC Films and then a few years later the EU Media Programme. So with that money I was able to travel around, do the research, film the places, film my father and myself on the road in this amazing tour of where he had been in prison, where he had escaped of him getting his files, demanding his files and ourselves getting in hot water as we went around to these places filming.

I suppose in a way you could not have made the film before about 1991 or 1992 when the Iron Curtain finally gave way...Correct. Before that time it was only just flirting with the idea of what could we do to make the film. There were people interested and I thought in my eyes, Oh gosh, I could maybe make it. I had done a couple of things. I had done my first successful full length TV drama and I had won a Bafta and I could go out and ask for money - seriously ask for money to direct a movie. Of course it is never as easy as that, but at that time the Communists had fallen and it seemed like you could go in and you could film in Russia I did know somebody who went. He had made a film and gone through all the horrors of mafia interference, had his camera or his negative kidnapped, at this point. So it was never going to be easy. But you are right. That was the point where you can, for the first time: a) find out the truth and b) find the other people in the story. What could be found by way of evidence for the story? What was the corroborating evidence? We found the corroborating evidence. Actual KGB files and mugshots. When you planned to film with Garri, you knew you would be filming with your father as well as a documentary subject. I mean thats a possible ethical conflict wasnt it and how did you plan to reconcile that conflict?Yes... Once you point a camera at someone anything can happen. Its like, once you point a camera, if you aim a gun, pull a gun at someone, you give someone the right to pull a gun at you, so all bets are off. I didnt know what would happen. I certainly didnt know when filming these tours like a video diary, that it could form the basis of a video documentary. I was thinking of the truth of what we were doing, notes of what we were doing. Seeing how my fathers character worked in these situations was very illuminating. For proof we went off we didnt know what would happen we went to Uzbekistan, still a very hard-line state today. You now people there still disappear and while I didnt think it was probable that I would be harmed, it was certainly possible that my father might be detained and thrown into jail. So it was, yea, proving what we were doing and I didnt know how he would react, because as people can see in the film he was very difficult about certain things. Not a case of being a docile or cooperative subject for a film, he said a lot of really amazing things, he did a lot of amazing things in the course of making the film. Equally, the film is a kind of probing examination of his life. Our relationship is part of that, but first of all it is kind of Who is the man?He actually expresses at one point some feelings about filming and documentary work when he is on camera and he is conscious of being on camera when he said it? [Stuart says Yea! chuckling.] Do you think that was deliberate?You know, he had just got out of the KGB, or what was the Uzbek security service now, what was the KGB building in Tashkent.. and he said to the camera; I am doing this all for you. He could have maybe not have got out, he could have said it because he was feeling incredibly sick and fed up with people. They were interesting observations made on the road about the very process of making a film that just exposes us to if not dangers, certainly deep stress. You know it is very tough to go to a cemetery where hundreds, certainly maybe tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. He knew his family had been killed there, that they had all disappeared from the camp at that time. Bullet holes in the grave it is all very stressful -- and bones sticking out of the earth.Your own background in modern history from Oxford must have given you a solid grasp of the political background to your fathers story...It was useful having been a student of these topics, the communist era, the Soviet era and the Second World War. I think it is valuable to have a grounding in what happened and studying the gulags or the era of Soviet repression. To have done that and then be standing there, that was privilege thing and also a frightening thing and going back over the years, things vary. I mean there were times when it was much easier to shoot in Russia and at other times it was risky and it got very difficult again, you know with whole sort of Putin anti-democratic agenda.Well, in fact in a sense, the film has the feel of a novel - locations, characters, everything. Did you know it could turn out that way? Did you plan for that sort of treatment of his story?Yes, it is like that, in a way. It was a priviledge in making the film just to meet this woman whom my father had loved fifty years ago and see what terrors she went through. Things so bad that I could not even include them in the documentary because they would overbalance my fathers story in the documentary and similar also with my uncle, who had survived all these terrible things and the revenge against the Nazis or collaborators, it makes you feel very humble about yourself. It is bound to, absolutely bound to... But these things that arent included in the documentary are a form of testimony of things that did happen... Have they just ended up on the cutting room floor or have they been put to some archive?I hope to use them at some point. But in the film, like the time when my fathers girl friend was in prison... when you are a KGB man you have to have your quota of cases, of people, for the month. She got indicted for harbouring a spy supposedly a spy my father. Then what happened to her that is n[pt in the film is that in the gulag she fell in love with a man, a French man who had been kidnapped by SMERSH the actual KGB cloak-and-dagger unit that play such a part in the Bond novels. He had been kidnapped and woke up to find he was in the gulag. She married him, he died in the gulag. She went to meet him for what she thought was a visit to go and visit her husband and he was presented in a coffin! That is the honest truth, that story. I have picture of her burying him. These horrors are so bad, if I was to include them in the film and to include them properly instead of a whistle-stop twenty seconds on it... well, there just wasnt room in an 80-minute documentary.

Of course. How nervous was your father about going back, I mean how did he feel returning to what had been his home?You know good question for man who I had very rarely in my life seen to show fear and with Uzbekistan and Ukraine as it was at this time, he showed fear and immense stress. You know he was going to be going into this building and doing what many people dared no to - especially in Uzbekistan, a very dangerous place and demand his file; having had threatening telephone calls. We know who you are Dr Urban! You havent changed! He would go and say How dare you say to me We know who you are - fuck off! sort of thing. It was difficult; and he was very brave about it. Aggressive, actually, is the word I would use. When he went into the house of torture for example, where he had suffered so badly, he was visibly, quite deeply, affected. Were you filming that yourself? Was it easy to keep on filming?Yes. I always felt the compulsion to film, even though he obviously got irritated by it at times. And thats the thing about filmmakers, you know Do you film your father or a subject? You dont know. The compulsion is to carry on filming and thats honesty and in a way its intrusion and it was part of the process of doing that. There was stuff that I didnt catch on camera that I wish I had, like when he was dealing with deep stress at that time after dealing with the KGB in Tashkent, or at least their successors the Uzbek security services, he got into a plane and at the age of 72 got into what was almost a fist fight with a group of Germans who had kicked his shoe along the aisle. I didnt have the camera then, which was a shame because it was a really very extraordinary confrontation. It just showed his incredible wildness, in a way, being ignited by the process and the stress of having to be confronted by these terrible places and the terrible memories that were still there.Some of the conditions described in the film really are quite shocking arent they? Not only his description of his torture, the exacution of the Jews in the graveyard in his home area, but also things like Garris brothers description of how he tracked down the Ukranian man who had murdered their sister and shot him dead. Did you ever feel that you would rather not expose some of these things they are members of your family to arent they?Well, I have continually asked my uncle several times Look, are you really sure you want to have this on film? You, confessing to what many people might consider a war crime... I have met many Germans who said Bravo to your uncle I think it is part of the process. Again, an honest documentary has to include things that might be difficult. There were members of my family who thought that should not be in, which is basically uncle saying yes, they did do revenge killings of collaborators and Nazis. This was part of what happened at the end of the war. It has not been covered in any great depth, that there were Jewish underground units that did carry out revenmge killings, or kangaroo courts and then executions of Nazis. My uncle was in one of those snatch squads. He didnt pull the trigger on any of these Nazis, but he did halp to locate them with his perfect German posing as a German and tracking down SS officers on a list. So again, I didnt go into huge depth on that because it is really a subject for another documentary. But setting against that, when you father was visiting his old family home as it were, he was celebrating, enjoying feasting, the odd drink Im sure passed around, but he was sitting among people who murdered his family?I think it is an amazing process, that people... In the room where my father went into, which was his parents home, occupied by what you could describe as usurpers my father didnt view them as that people who had taken over the home either through the approval of the state, or perhaps the approval of the Nazi occupiers, because this village was half Jewish and now not a single Jew lives in a village of a good few thousand people... I have to say that while some might have been frightened or appalled and would not have wanted to go into the rooms, let alone socialise deeply and get along very well with the locals, I think that if those people occupying what were Jewish homes were genuinely guilty, they wouldnt have welcome him. So I think my father was right, these were not the people with blood on their hands. And if they were, well some of them were sons of, or daughters of and not old enough to have been of the wartime generation and I think can be forgiven. I am sure that my father not for one moment believed that those around him were actual perpetrators, not the older people and some of the older people were victims of Soviet repression and had been in the gulag, such as you see in the film and had come back from years in the gulag. So I think that it was a really positive experience to see that certainly, due to the stresses of the whole communist era after the German attack the local population initially welcomed the Germans, many of them. Some of them say this was a very hostile area to Jewish communities there; and that is why 99% were killed That isnt the situation now. There is a genuine rapprochement and I never felt and my father never felt any direct tension or anti-semitism and I think this is very positiveOn the film the evidence is certainly seen that he was welcomed like an old friend and he was entertaining people in his own familys home.Yes, he was almost like a prodigal son not a prodigal son... Like a ghost that came back. A ghost, who people remembered as a little boy. I suppose he has proved that life can continue and that he had made a success of his life and escaped the Soviets and their tortures and repressions and had come back a man with a little bit of money and well-dressed and that meant something and a business man and a doctor; and that was a village where people walked in bare feet without boots. To them the Jews were kind of a phenomenon, who had been there like ghosts and had vanished and here one came back. And not only that but who had survived what many of the villagers had gone through too, you know, the Soviet camps and he had kind of cocked a snook at them. It is important to remember they hated the communist era. They had just been liberated and of course he was someone who had come out with his head high from the Soviet tortures...When did shooting finally wrap and how long had it all taken?On the film? The film had really evolved over about fourteen years. The reason was and I dont know if this was made clear obviously you have to go and make several trips and make that really difficult procedure to get into the archives and you have to carry on. Still I would say that the film wrapped some time about 15 months ago in the middle of last year and then we spent a long time editing it and it wrapped effectively with the final denial of the KGB from the archives that that had never had any record of my father, which was obvious nonsense, but anyway you had that in writing. The process had taken that long because of all the difficulty of looking into the archives, but also the opposition on my fathers part to my doing a film. I made a film in 1998 which was the central portion of his interviews, so I had done that about nine years ago. Then a year after that I had completed the film I thought at least A form of the film and he didnt want it shown and we had a big row and I parked the edit and the footage. He died in 2004 and I thought well, I have to finish this film, whatever I discover and then discovered various things by doing further research things that he might have loved to have seen in his life, like details of his mothers life and a picture of his father who had been killed in the holocaust; stuff which he had never seen, pictures. He had not seen since that period, an image of his father. So I continued And it was only possible to continue because he wasnt there to be able to say, Dont show this or do this, which had been a problem with the documentary, that the subject didnt want to collaborate completely with the film.Well now, the dossier, this file that your father had been searching for throughout the film, his file, his personal file, he finally got back or perhaps got half of it back, from the KGB it finally disappeared presumably by his own hand why do you think he destroyed it?I dont like to speculate too much. I want people to see the film so I dont want to talk about it too much because it is a pivotal point of the film. I think it is necessary for people to experience all, the nuances of the character and journey that we go through in looking for the file in order to form your own view. In the film, theres this big quest for the file and then theres this big shock as to what happened to the file, from which only fragments remain. I offer what opinions I can in the film from one of the best historians in the world who tries to advise me what this may or may not mean. And ultimately, none of us know you know. It may be that in, well certainly there is, somewhere deep in the archive of the KGB would be the evidence, of certainly if my father had been some kind of James Bond figure working for them on foreign missions. The likelihood of finding and getting hold of a copy, of getting hold of that file is very minimal as much as it is on any British agent actually I mean one can criticise them for being closed but it would be very difficult to find out which people had been British agents operating in Russia in the 1940s.So perhaps we will never know the answer...No, I mean its a real mystery. I would like very much to know how people feel about the film and if they are interested in the mysteries of the film and what their own theories are.What about members of your own family, those that are left, people who knew your father well, have they seen the film? What did they think of it?Well, my mother who is obviously a very important person mostly off-screen in the film glimpsed at the beginning in her glory days of the 1960s and then later; my mother is more inclined towards my fathers version of his life, my brother has a more sceptical view. I dont mean in the sense of being hostile, but both of us being history students are used to reading these kinds of cases, of people the KGB put to torture. The statistic exists that only one in one hundred did not sign the confession that they demanded, so like medieval torture, or god knows, Guantanamo, or the extraordinary rendition of today, so of people who are tortured, the vast majority always give in. I think the question in this film is, did my father give in, in some way? Or if he did, was his pact with his torturers, the KGB, was it something that he was able to stand on his own terms? Now there is something that is very interesting about my fathers case which is that when he went back, there is uncontravertible evidence that he was a spy, on the wanted list as an international spy. That was presented in black and white. There it was in the file.Yea. And we were told this and warned about this. The KGB actually said when we went and met them Oh, We had better take you off the wanted list, because you are on our wanted list! Now this is a very interesting piece of evidence because it could mean that my father perhaps had been on a mission for them and had absconded, you see. This why he was so worried about for example, when my brother was in the Soviet or Soviet-controlled area of Afghanistan as a journalist. My father was always very worried. He did worry when he published the book whether they would sent a hit team to get him. It seem extraordinary even to say that, but then in 1980 it wasnt that far off the mark, when Markov, the dissident from Bulgaria was poisoned with a hit on a London bridge. And of course not that long ago; Litvinenko. So I mean my father wasnt paranoid. There was a possibility that he would be assassinated for speaking out. The fact was that he was so worried about it indicates to me that perhaps there was something more than just being a guy who got away from the Soviet Union illegally. He was perhaps someone whom they really wanted and whom they really thought was important and why they would try and bump him off for speaking out about the gulag. So it is possible.All kinds of things are possible and we will never get to the bottom of that.Will we ever get to the bottom of the Litvinenko case? Unlikely I would think. Only a few people in the Kremlin will ever know the truth.

Any particularly good does or donts when filming in potentially hostile territory then Stuart?Well it does help if you have a father who has got the balls to completely bluff that he knows the president of this country and to have his phone number! Now that got us out of trouble when we got arrested, but most people dont have a father who may have that appropriate degree of chutzpah. I was both protected and exposed by having such a strong character as my father with me en route. He could get me on an overbooked Aeroflot plane on an internal flight. There were fist fights at the gate, actually on the tarmac, to get onto the gangway of the plane and my father had bribed some stewardess to get him in through another entrance onto the plane and that was it. We got on first. So it helps to have someone like that. But if you cant have someone like that, well I kind of carried on as best I could. One important thing of course is to if you are probing into a personal, family story never stop asking questions. The more questions that you ask that are informed questions and it helps to have people around you to analyse documents. For example it is great if you can pose the right questions. One question I never thought of posing in my life, even though I had studied history was, if my father was, as he was rearrested three years after escaping from the gulag, from that dreadful hostile environment, why was he not charged with escaping from the gulag when he was re-arrested? And do you know, I never really thought of that until I had hired a researcher who then asked that very difficult question. One which I was never able to pose to my father, while he was alive.What a shame because the answer would have been very interesting.Yea! Really interesting. You know you have got to be like a dog with a bone and like a journalist, or a kind of gumshoe.On the scent!...yea, and you must never give up and just keep probing into the absolute...And when you get arrested and detained by the secret police what do you advise filmmakers to do?Well... The Uzbek security services who are dangerous people they had arrested us actually on a minor offence for filming at a station without permission. But the trouble was that we knew that my father was known to the Uzbek security service. He used a very simple technique which was massive bluster, dont take any shit, release me, unhand-me-you-beast kind of approach and I-am-well-known, how-dare-you-arrest-me. And his approach was a really successful one, but it could have gone equally very badly. To pull off the kind of outraged reaction to carry off that kind of thing most people are cowed I was arrested after he died, filming at the Kremlin wall, while I was doing a piece to camera about my father had been tortured, persecuted and arrested and this was just some young bastard who was looking for a bribe, but he said you know I am arresting you you are facing a $2,000 bribe and you are not going anywhere! because my flight was due and I was going that day out of Russia. OK I was not in mortal danger, but I certainly risked going into jail and risked a $2,000 bribe to this young criminal. I used whatever begging and persuasion techniques we could and eventually luckily these people were not very bright and we persuaded them that the British pound was worth quite a lot and they settled for what we had on us -- about sixty quid -- and we just ran, ran from the Kremlin as fast as we could, after they had let us go. But it was really a very modest experience to what many go through. I can only say that it helps who you are with, at all times. It is good tohave good translators, good researchers, who know the system. The very worst is when you blundering in without due consideration of where you are, how dangerous it is or isnt and how to get yourself covered, or protected, in the event of an arrest, you know?

So it is not quite the James Bond franchise market, but what do you see as the market for the film and how do you plan to get it?I am afraid I am one of those people who makes a film thinking; I want to make this film and if enough people believe in me they will finance it and I will get to make it. I really did want to make a film about my father as a son and if people are interested in it and it seems that quite a few people are interested, like festivals, and it has won a few awards and things. I think people are going to be interested in it where they have an interest in a real survival story; the price of survival, or the method of survival, how does someone get through the incredible things? This story will interest them. Then there are people who are interested in history, like the history of an area we havent seen before or heard so much about. We have seen quite a lot of holocaust documentaries, but what we have here that is so unusual is someone who went through both the holocaust and the gulag, not as a figure of misery, but as a figure of one review called it a swaggering, impressive figure, so thats what I think is interesting about the film; that some one could go through what he did and to find out a bit more about life how could someone do that? He is certainly larger than life...Larger then life! Exactly! And yet for all that he could be larger than life and still be mysterious, you see. The film is about mystery. Well this was a huge project for you in personal terms. Any advice that you can pass on to filmmakers if they should take on this kind of personal project, a film like this that looks at the family and so forth...Yea. I think what is really interesting about the changes in technology and I mean about people and about organisations composed of people who are aware of this, but I came to the story kind of as a person who made a home movie, but perhaps it might appeal beyond the family and the local community and people who knew my father.So I think the lessons that are in it are, well as my father himself says in the film; never give up. Or never give in was his term really, which was never give in to the KGB, which would have been the ultimate wrong thing to do. I was inspired by what I thought he had gone through and I thought well, if you have a family story and it is very encouraging that a number of filmmakers have broken out and told things from an intimate family perspective Theres I For India, theres Tarnation, theres 51 Birch Street, theres My Architect actually several stories by Jewish sons about Jewish fathers, theres Tell Them Who You Are... These are by people who, with varying degrees of budget and professionalism, have something very interesting to say, who have documented family life and it is good that people have been able to get those films out and find out that the world is interested. So I think that now we are moving into the user-generated content generation. You have got all those media where you can just throw some of your life onto the web. I think this - making grown up documentaries about your family and about your own life is going to be a really valid and important sub-genre in documentary. Maybe it will really grow I think it will. And the technology now allows you to do it without spending an absolute fortune. So you are saying the technologys there, dont fear it; go for it...I think so. Obviously things can rebound. You might want to make a film about your family your family might get very upset. Your brother or your dad may have a very different view of reality. What is suprising about this is that documentary, just like drama, is about constructing a world and a truth. My brother and I agree that if we both made a documentary about our father with maybe some of the same material, we would make two very different documentaries.