Amosov’s Centenary

A Ukrainian filmmaking team and Oleksandr Samsonenko-led initiative group announced the launch of the campaign to collect documentary evidence, as part of UNESCO Mykola Amosov Year celebrations in 2013 and in honor of the prominent innovative cardiac surgeon’s birth centenary. The full-length documentary Amosov’s Centenary will be based on the information collected about the academician, which will also contribute to the development of amosov.org website.

“We call Amosov ‘a Renaissance man’ in our conversations. He combined everything organically, including the physical, spiritual, and intellectual qualities. The film should be equally all-embracing. We want to create a movie that will be of value primarily as a piece of documentary evidence. Our nation has a memory loss issue, and it should be rectified, if we are to develop properly,” the screenwriter and director Serhii Lysenko said at a press conference held at the National Museum of Medicine of Ukraine. Organizers also presented a short video with Amosov’s eldest patient, 66-year-old Oleksandr Honcharenko who had suffered from the triple heart disease, recalling his encounter with the surgeon 52 years ago.

Amosov’s Centenary is scheduled for limited premiere showing in early December, and the organizers say they have already collected 75 percent of the funds needed to make it.

According to the cardiac surgeon’s daughter and initiator of filming Kateryna Amosova, the future movie is meant to show her father as a multidimensional man, who was a physician and Ukraine’s first developer of the heart-lung machine, a cyberneticist, a writer, a social activist and philosopher, as well as to address the subject of moral duty and carrying it out.

Let us recall that Amosov saved about 5,000 patients in the course of his medical practice, and was voted the second greatest Ukrainian after Yaroslav the Wise by the public in the Great Ukrainians project in 2008.

By Elvira MATROSOVA