There’s more than one way to tell the story of a pioneering Irish medic, and for his chronicling of the life and times of Co Fermanagh cancer researcher Denis Burkitt, film-maker Éanna Mac Cana has opted for a beautifully surreal and almost feverish documentary. Burkitt (TG4, Wednesday) is a dreamlike film full of unmooring and eye-catching imagery – rooted in Mac Cana’s personal experience of undergoing treatment in 2017 for Burkitt’s lymphoma, the condition that Burkitt first identified while working with the British Colonial Medical service in Uganda.
There are layers and layers to Burkitt. But Mac Cana never loses sight of his central mission, which is to set out the essentials of the medic’s life. He begins with Burkitt’s childhood in rural Fermanagh and then explores his criss-crossing of Africa and his determination to discover the cause of the cancer of the jaw and mouth that he found among children he was treating in Uganda.
But the film isn’t just history. It contextualises Burkitt’s contribution to medicine through the prism of Mac Cana’s chemotherapy sessions at Belfast City Hospital. And it poses questions about colonialism – leaving open-ended the issue of how an Irishman from a British-ruled part of the island ended up in Uganda in the twilight of the UK’s exploitation of Africa. That the story is relayed in Irish adds another gloss of subtext.
That sounds like a lot, and in the hands of a less adept film-maker, Burkitt could have been a mess. But Mac Cana pulls off the balancing act wonderfully, blending a stark traditional music soundtrack with poetic narration. “I began learning about you. Denis Burkitt, your name, my cancer,” he says early on – a line that hits like an invocation or a prayer.
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Archive footage of Burkitt suggests a passionate and down-to-earth surgeon. He talks about his father – Fermanagh’s county surveyor - and his enthusiasm for birdwatching and how he became one of the leading contributors at the time to “British ornithology”. Devoutly Christian, Burkitt’s faith led him to Uganda – along with his wife, Olive – where he saved hundreds of lives.
Burkitt was also a keen photographer, and Mac Cana traces his life with these images of Fermanagh, England (where he met Olive during the war), and Uganda’s vast, lush expanses. These biographical components are set alongside fragmentary recollections of Mac Cana’s cancer treatment – a journey portrayed as deeply halluctionary, as if his body were haunted by forces beyond its comprehension.
“The scan was clear but the treatment had taken its toll,” he says. “I became scared to open my mouth and see a lump inside.”
Burkitt ends with a grainy image of a woman walking away from the hospital, taken from the window of the director’s ward. It seems to be his mother, but Mac Cana never clarifies. Like so much else in this mesmerising documentary, it is left to the viewer to work out - one more enigma in a film that brims with mystery yet also paints an authentic and straightforward portrait of Burkitt as one of the great unheralded Irishmen of the 20th century.
