大象传媒

Series in which celebrities trace their family trees.

Zoe Wanamaker was born in New York, but when she was three her father, American actor Sam Wanamaker, fled to the UK to escape the anti-communist McCarthy witch-hunts. Hoping to better understand her father's decision, Zoe heads to Washington DC where she visits the FBI headquarters. Here, under the Freedom of Information Act, Zoe gets access to her father's FBI file, an extraordinary document that reveals the level of scrutiny Sam was under and the very real risk of imprisonment he faced.

Wanting to explore the roots of her father's left-wing politics, Zoe next looks into the life of her father's father, Maurice Wanamaker, an emigre Russian Jew. Zoe is moved to discover that soon after his arrival in Chicago, Maurice suffered a series of personal tragedies and hardships that almost destroyed his American dream.

Finally Zoe travels to Nicolaev in the Ukraine, where she discovers the original form of her unusual surname and the reason why her family originally left for America.