The English Surgeon Preps for Operation in New York and L.A.

Winner of the Best Feature Documentary at both the 2008 Hotdocs and Silverdocs, I haven’t seen the doc but the trailer alone packs an emotional punch (see below) and is certainly worth checking out. Opening in New York on July 24th and in Los Angeles July 31st, and featuring original music by Nick Cave, Geoffrey Smith‘s The English Surgeon which the press kit calls a “gory medical thriller as well a meditation on mortality and the struggle to find meaning in life.” 

The doc features Henry Marsh is one of London’s foremost brain surgeons, a phlegmatic, philosophical man with no illusions about the nature of his work. “When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on people’s thoughts and feelings…and if something goes wrong I can destroy that person’s character…forever.”

On a trip to Kiev to give a lecture in 1992, Marsh was shocked to witness the plight of those with severe neurological problems there – a ghastly world of primitive clinics, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and medieval surgery – and began making regular trips back to diagnose patients and perform operations whenever possible.

Award-winning filmmaker Geoffrey Smith followed Marsh on one of these trips in 2007, plunging into the chaos of the quest to see and save as many patients as possible. As the Ukrainian winter whirls around them, Marsh and his maverick Ukrainian counterpart, neurosurgeon Igor Kurilets, work around the clock to get through the endless lines of people who look upon Marsh as their last hope.

Offering the chance of life one minute and the sentence of death the next, the scenes of Marsh diagnosing these patients are intimate and intense. Marsh himself is terribly conflicted about how few he is able to help – and deeply remorseful when he recalls those who have died in the attempt. But Marian Dolishny, a poor, religious young man suffering from a brain tumor that will soon kill him, is one that Marsh believes he can save – providing he is awake throughout the entire operation. As the cameras roll, Dolishny undergoes a harrowing, unforgettable 15-minute procedure in the depths of the KGB hospital as Marsh wages his battle against certain death with a cordless Bosch power drill, sheer determination and gallows humor.