Wednesday saw a double bill at the National Film Theatre starting with The English Surgeon, a documentary which follows an English neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh, who donates his time to assist with the diagnosis and surgery of brain tumours in a Ukrainian hospital.

Realising that the gap between films was just going to be long enough, I was lucky enough to get the chance to do a quick interview with Geoffrey Smith, the director of Surgeon, who was in attendance with Henry Marsh, himself.

The English Surgeon emotionally brings to life its three central characters; the modest Marsh, his Ukrainian colleague Igor Kuliets, who has suffered constant scrutiny since railing against the state of Ukrainian healthcare in the early 1990s, and Marian, who has epilepsy induced by a brain tumour, which will eventually kill him.

Marsh holds the painful memory of Tanya, a Ukrainian girl he brought to the UK for surgery, which failed, leaving Tanya debilitated for the last two years of her life. Marsh's memory of Tanya illustrates the dilemma that he must face, of whether it is better to risk surgery or to be certain of the patient's death in the near future.

The film has a sense of thoughtful honesty and skilfully plays off Marsh's rye humour with the solemn role that he must play in diagnosing sometimes inoperable patients. Incongruously, the polish of the filming gives the filmic impression that the documentary has somehow been faked, which, of course, it has not.

Second on the bill was Empties, a distinctly unsubtle Czech comedy about a retired school teacher. Following a stint as a courier, whilst working in a supermarket bottle bank he takes it on himself to arrange a series of romantic liaisons, to the chagrin of his wife. It stars and was written by Zdenek Sverak, whose son Jan directs. This is apparently the highest grossing Czech film since the fall of Communism. Unless there is something lost in translation, Empties seems not much better than the phenomenally successfully Russian fantasy Nightwatch.

One day to go...