Malmros' father Richard was a world-famous neurosurgeon (among other things, he invented a method for removing brain aneurysms). When it became known that he had used Thorotrast as a contrast agent in his operations during the German occupation of Denmark - for lack of alternatives - and thus risked the premature death of all his patients from liver cancer (in fact, many of them succumbed to this disease), he found himself in the firing line of a scandalous press decades later ...
Facing the Truth (At Kende Sandheden) uses the example of Richard Malmros to examine what it means to constantly face the question of life and death, to have to decide again and again about the duration of a person's existence on earth. In turn, this is the portrait of a talented man from a poor background who never knew how to settle into his new, socially exposed position. Incidentally, Nils Malmros himself works as a neurosurgeon and performed the operations shown in Facing the Truth himself. In other words: the identification with the father (which should not be understood as simply affirmative!) goes a long way, the son seems to be searching for his own (in)guilt in the father's behavior ...
