BBC documentary The English Surgeon follows Henry Marsh, neurosurgeon, who travels from London to lend his expertise to a Ukrainian hospital.

For fifteen years Marsh has used his spare time to provide treatment and advice in the former Soviet Republic, alongside his Ukrainian colleague Igor Kurilets. The film particularly focuses on a patient called Marian. He will die of a brain tumour without treatment, and undergoes surgery performed by Marsh.

Through careful editing and good camera work, the documentary footage actually looks as if it has been planned which, of course, it had not.

Director Geoffrey Smith sat for a couple of minutes to talk about the film.

Were you worried about creating a narrative out of factual events?
The scenes with the grandmother and the scene with the blond girl Ulyana, they are just as you see them, there is no music to manipulate people, there's nothing other than what happened. That drama in that room is extraordinary, there's only one way to describe it. My job is just to convince and make it accessible over time. A lot of the film lasts for five or ten minutes anyway, some of it is real time. If you've got good characters in your story, you don't need tricks, you don't need deceit or deception.

How did you choose to focus on Marian?
They do about fifteen operations when they're there, so logistically there was only room to follow one or two patients through, and I believed that Marian was going to carry our sympathy. We are all patients at some point, we all know what it is like to be in hospital, whether it's something as serious as that. You don't need much to be in Marian's shoes, it's the genius of the surgery and the circumstances under which it happens, that I found interesting. So we just chose Marian. Even if it hadn't worked it would still be Marian.

Will the film be cut for TV?
Storyville -- I need about three minutes out of it. It's 88:45 in all.

How did the film come to have Nick Cave writing the music?
I grew up in Melbourne at the same time as Nick, and I know him briefly from that time, but he's good friends with another friend of mine from here, and he loved the film, he absolutely loved Henry, and felt it was an honour to take part. To me his music is just perfect, he's thoughtful and he's sensitive, and the feel is just right so it's beautiful at the same time.

Do you know if you'll work with Henry again?
Maybe, yeah. He goes to Sudan and he does all sorts of interesting things, so maybe there's another film somewhere in the making.

Can you tell me about what he is doing in Sudan?
He gets invited to all sorts of places, and, I think out of curiosity as much as anything else, he goes and sees whether he can be of some use.

Thanks a lot for your time; it's been good to meet you.