A documentary film by Thomas Lahusen and Susan Solomon. Color & b/w; French, English, and Russian; English or French subtitles. Digital HD 16:9; 71 min. Chemodan Films (Toronto, Canada), December 2011.
The search for a 20th century Russian émigré, whose world was the “no place” of border crossings. A refugee from Tsarist prison, Alexander Roubakine (1889-1979) moved to Paris where he took his medical degree. Roubakine’s Paris was the site of a complex Russian emigration-- “White” Russians who had fled the Bolshevik regime crossed paths with “pro-Soviet” Russians who escaped the tsarist regime. Unable to practice medicine in France because he was a foreign national, Roubakine parlayed his medical credentials into a series of go-between roles. He was a loyal servant of the Soviet government in France, external expert in Health Section of the League of Nations in Geneva, and fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. A member by marriage of an illustrious high bourgeois (and left-leaning) French family, Roubakine put down deep roots in France. In 1941, like other Russians living in France, he found himself a prisoner in two French concentration camps, the first in the Pyrenees and the second in Algeria. Soon after being repatriated to Russia in 1943, he secured a long-coveted post in the Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow. During the Cold War, he maintained personal and professional contacts in France. In the 1960s, he enjoyed the rare privilege of foreign travel. Roubakine’s parallel lives made him an important intermediary between Russia and the West, but they complicated his allegiances and sense of identity. The film chronicles a double odyssey—the passages of Roubakine and his pursuit by the filmmakers, always a step behind their quarry. Shot in Paris, Moscow, Geneva, Lausanne , the Pyrenees, New York, and Toronto, the film contrasts the “voice” of Roubakine that sounds from his autobiographical statements against interviews with surviving family members, personal photos and letters, and official Soviet-era documents.
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