“The Empire’s Surgeon” by Guillaume Main

With a film like “The Empire’s Surgeon” it is perhaps necessary to rethink the limits of short cinema.
Guillaume Main brings a dramatic and powerful historical story to the screen, with a surprising ability and an aesthetic taste that excites from the first minute to the last.
Alongside a formal and directorial elegance worthy of the great classic cinema, Main manages to lead the intimate and universal narration of an extraordinary man. With great firmness therefore, the film is never a simple exercise in style but a necessary and precious reconstruction of a short epic. For this reason, the precision and realism of writing stands out, capable of “sewing” the staging to the psychology of the characters, in a continuous stylistic and narrative coherence that make this film solid and credible.

“The Empire’s Surgeon” excites without ever falling into banality and manages to raise the feelings of the characters above the narrative, above History. The technical effort is phenomenal but never exaggerated. Every element, however wonderful, is not there to amaze but to communicate. And until the end the film succeeds in this mission.