Burkitt review – fascinating film intertwines lives of patient and trailblazing surgeon | Film

IThe Néanna Mac Cana survey documentary, Two Lives, is angry with fascinating results. The film’s seeds were planted for the first time when Mac Cana was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, rare and aggressive cancer; His diary videos capture the loneliness of his treatment, spent in the cold and yellow walls of hospital rooms. Through the objective of its digital camera, it occasionally welcomes the distant and blurred view of the Tour blocks, or its mother by bicycle at the clinic. The outside world seems impenetrable; During all this time, the film goes beyond what the eyes can see.

Then, by turning to the past, Mac CanS juxtaposes his experience of the disease lived with the history of the life of Denis Burkitt, the Irish pioneer surgeon after which, the state of Mac Cana, was appointed. Archives and interviews with experts and Burkitt family, Mac Cana classifies the trajectory of scientist’s career in Africa. The cartography is, in fact, at the heart of Burkitt’s research on the disease: like his father, an passionate amateur ornithologist who documented the migration of birds, Burkitt retraced the geographic distribution of pediatric cancer then unknown on the continent.

The stylistic choices of Mac Cana become another form of cartography, with the graphics and drawings of Burkitt, it is sometimes imposed on the filmmaker’s own images. The effect looks like a visual tree branch, which connects the past and the present, the scientist and the staff. The colossal archives of Burkitt photographs make another link, even if the colonial gaze of the scientist is not much more than mention. However, it is far from a work of hagiography: by highlighting some of the most melancholic chapters of Burkitt’s private life, Mac Cana lends a human element to the heritage of a pioneer.