Gods

Zbigniew Religa is a heart surgeon in Poland. At the end of the seventies no heart transplant is performed in the country; the attempts have failed and the medical world considers it impossible. Religa insists on trying. He builds his own team, opens a theatre in a provincial hospital, and starts losing patients. After each death the press and his colleagues blame him. He continues. Łukasz Palkowski directs. Tomasz Kot plays Religa. The story is real. Zbigniew Religa performed the first successful heart transplant in Poland in 1987 and is regarded as the founder of cardiac surgery there. The film has a known visual reference: a photograph of Religa sitting at the end of the table watching his patient after the operation is internationally recognised, and the film reconstructs that moment. The subject is not medicine but persistence. Religa is not sympathetic; he is shown as coarse, stubborn, smoking and listening to nobody. The period detail is strong: the absence of equipment in eighties Poland, the bureaucracy and the state of the hospitals are given directly. It was a large commercial success in Poland and took many of the country's film awards. Who it is for: viewers who like biography drawn from real events and medical drama. Who it is not for: the surgical scenes are explicit, the narrative runs in a familiar shape, and the ending goes where it is expected.