The English Surgeon is a fantastic documentary which screened on
Storyville a few weeks ago. It already did extremely well at London
Independent Film Festival and Sheffield, and last week picked up the
award for Best International Feature Documentary at HotDocs. The jury said of the film: "Polished and shameless, in
the best sense of combining two seemingly contradictory elements and
shaping them into a satisfying and penetrating whole; as one juror
noted, this film has everything."
Henry Marsh is an English neurosurgeon who splits his time between the
NHS and hugely under resourced hospitals in Urkraine. "Surgery is not
just about rational altruism,¿ he explains just before a crucial
operation. ¿It¿s a blood sport in a way. Surgeons become surgeons for
the
excitement of it and the fierce joy of operating." This film is not a
heady medical drama about whether patients will survie - it's a
porthole into Henry's mindset , and how he deals with very real life
and death situations.
Human psychology figures greatly in good
human-doctor interactions, as is evident in one of the closing scenes.
A pretty young blond comes to find out what's wrong her, and brain
scans reveal an inoperable growth that spells certain death within 5
years, prefaced by blindness and other bodily function losses. With
news this blunt, the human spirit cannot cope and so truth is not an
option. Henry instead chats with his Igor, his assistant, (a co-incidental and
humorous namesake of Frankenstein's own assistant), implying options,
and then insists she returns with her mother before any news can be
delivered.
This is a large scale documentary, filmed with multiply camera set-ups
in the operating theatre, with high quality sound and music composed by
Nick Cave. It was a struggle to put together the international funding
package, and director Geoffrey Smith worked with documentary producer
Rachel Wexler, whom he met at DFG funding course. There's a great interview with Geoffrey on their site about the history of the project.
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