Malmros’s father Richard was a famous Danish neurosurgeon who got dragged into a scandal when it became public that, during the German occupation he had, for want of alternatives, used Thorotrast as a radiocontrast agent in his operations, putting hundreds of people at risk of an early demise through liver cancer. To properly look at Facing the Truth we need to know that Malmros himself also worked for some time as a neurosurgeon – it’s Malmros himself who’s performing the operations in the film. Which is to say that Facing the Truthis not a biopic about Richard Malmros and his times. The film takes the basic situation, the core dilemma and the general circumstances of Malmros’s life as a starting point for a work on considerations that are more complex, wider, more general: choice, guilt and the nature of desperate measures.
