In Éanna Mac Cana’s probing documentary, two lives are entwined with fascinating results. The seeds for the film were first planted when Mac Cana was diagnosed with Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare and aggressive cancer; his diaristic videos capture the loneliness of his treatment, spent within the cold, yellow walls of hospital rooms. Through the lens of his digital camera, he occasionally takes in the distant, blurry sight of tower blocks, or his mother cycling to the clinic. The world outside appears impenetrable; all the while, the film reaches beyond what the eyes can see.
Then, turning to the past, Mac Cana juxtaposes his lived experience of illness with the life story of Denis Burkitt, the trailblazing Irish surgeon after whom Mac Cana’s condition was named. From archival materials as well as interviews with experts and Burkitt’s family, Mac Cana charts the trajectory of the scientist’s career in Africa. Cartography is, in fact, central to Burkitt’s research into the disease: like his father, a keen amateur ornithologist who documented bird migration, Burkitt traced the geographical distribution of the then-unknown paediatric cancer in the continent.
Mac Cana’s stylistic choices become another form of mapping, with Burkitt’s charts and drawings occasionally laid over the film-maker’s own images. The effect resembles a visual tree branch, one that connects the past and the present, the scientific and the personal. Burkitt’s colossal archive of photographs makes for another link, even if the scientist’s colonial gaze gets not much more than a mention. Still, this is far from a work of hagiography: by highlighting some of the more melancholic chapters of Burkitt’s private life, Mac Cana lends a human element to the legacy of a pioneer.
• Burkitt is on True Story from 25 July.
