Fake Gagarin

The daughters of the first man in space, Yury Gagarin, are suing a Moscow production company over a fictional film drama released in April in which a black Russian orphan claims Gagarin was his grandfather.

In "Gagarin's Grandson," the boy, who has taken the surname Gagarin from the name of the village in which he lives, says he was conceived after Gagarin visited Cameroon and eloped with a local woman. The cosmonaut's daughters, Yelena and Galina, argue the film defames Gagarin by implying that he had extramarital sexual relations.

The hearing is due to begin Friday. Central Partnership, the film's production company, has warned that a court victory for Gagarin's daughters would violate the right to freedom of speech and set a dangerous precedent.

"Central Partnership has deep respect for the memory of Yury Alexeyevich Gagarin," Sergei Shestakov, head of Central Partnership, said in an e-mail. "The film merely contains indirect mentions of his name, which it's impossible in any case to consider offensive."

He added: "We're talking about a fictional work that, distinct from a documentary, doesn't pretend to provide a detailed elucidation of past events. What takes place on screen is a creative invention."

Yelena Gagarina, the director of the Kremlin Museums, refused to comment for this article. Galina Gagarina, who teaches in the faculty of regional economics at Moscow's Plekhanov Academy of Economics, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

At a preliminary hearing two weeks ago, the lawyer for the daughters, Galina Grishanina, said, "Asserting that Yury Gagarin entered into irregular sexual relations smears his name," Interfax reported.

"Gagarin's Grandson" stars Done Lema, an actor from the Moscow region, and was directed by Andrei Panin, who in 2006 released "Scum," a controversial film about a group of Soviet boys trained for a suicidal attack on the Nazis.

The film begins with a white man discovering he has a brother living in an orphanage. More surprisingly, the brother is black, and loves nothing more than smoking, drinking and stealing. He also tells everyone he meets that he's the cosmonaut's grandson.

"For him, it's a distinctive means of communications with the outside world, a way to attract attention," Shestakov said. "Later, of course, he confesses that it's a fabrication."

Filmmakers don't need to seek the permission of a famous person's relatives to make a movie about them, Shestakov said. However Alexander Kostikov, a lawyer at the Mayakovsky Theater, said they nevertheless often do.

"As a rule, directors behave very respectfully," he noted.

Kostikov said he doubted the daughters would win, since, in his view, the film makes it clear that the orphan character is making up his story.

To anyone who knows anything about Yury Gagarin, it should be clear from the outset that the boy is lying, said Larisa Filina, director of the Korolyov Museum in Moscow, which is devoted to the chief designer of the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite, Sergei Korolyov.

Gagarin "was a person of high morals and very responsible as a communist and as an officer," she said.

Another space-related film opens next week in Russian cinemas. "Korolyov," directed by Yury Kara and starring Sergei Astakhov, tells the story of the chief designer before his work on Sputnik. He almost died in a gulag camp in Kolyma after being convicted of subversion.