The Belarusfilm national studio presents the premiere of the documentary “Doctor Shuba”

On 2 August 2019 the Belarusfilm national film studio presented the premiere of the documentary “Doctor Shuba” about the fate of legendary Belarusian doctor Alexey Ivanovich Shuba.

The work on the film continued four years. The authors express thanks for assistance to the Belarusian State Archives of Scientific and Technical Documentation, the Belarusian State Archives of Films, Photographs and Sound Recordings, the Russian State Archives of Documentary Films and Photographs, the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus, the State Archives of Minsk Region, the Museum of the History of Medicine of Belarus etc.

Thanks to the thorough examination of archive and museum documents and the recollections by relatives and colleagues, the film director Anatoly Alay, People’s Artist of Belarus, who was himself born into the family of physicians, managed to restore the complicated and conflicting pages from the life of Alexey Shuba, a brilliant surgeon as well as a talented manager, medical practitioner in the war and postwar time, Partisan member, patriot, truth-seeker…

While Alexey Shuba worked as a chief physician at the 1st Clinical Hospital in Minsk (from 1952), the hospital became one of the best in the Soviet Union, including not only a hospital for a thousand beds but also all outpatient clinics and polyclinics in the Sovetsky and Pervomaisky districts in Minsk. More than three thousand medical staff were subordinate to Doctor Alexey Shuba.

The Wikipedia shows Alexey Shuba’s awards and regalia, but speaks no word about the hard time of his repression, deprivation of titles, expulsion from the Communist Party, removal from social life etc. And all this has been narrated rather minutely and pathetically in the new documentary.

The premiere of the documentary brought together representatives of participating institutions, former colleagues, associates and relatives of Alexey Shuba (some of them came from Israel and USA). Incidentally, the daughter of the famous doctor, Alla Alexeyevna, has become a neurophysiologist, and his great granddaughter is now finishing the Medical University.