Must-watchWorld War II · Film · 1996
The English Patient
In a ruined Tuscan monastery at the end of the war, a Canadian nurse cares for a badly burned stranger whose memories of desert maps, the Cave of Swimmers and a forbidden love affair in Cairo slowly return.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 4 places.
Stop 1: Cave of Swimmers, Gilf Kebir
Key location
Almásy's expedition finds a cave painted with ancient swimmers, and he falls for Katharine Clifton while they record it.
Stop 2: Cairo, Egypt
Back in Cairo, their secret affair unfolds among embassy parties and hotel rooms as war approaches.
Stop 3: Kufra oasis, Libya
Walking out of the desert for help, Almásy reaches a British outpost where his foreign name gets him arrested as a spy.
Stop 4: Monastery in the hills above Florence
Hana stays behind with her dying patient in a bombed-out monastery, joined by a Sikh sapper and a tortured Canadian spy.
What really happened
The patient is based on the real László Almásy, a Hungarian aviator and desert explorer who surveyed the Gilf Kebir plateau in the 1930s and in 1933 found the painted rock shelter now called the Cave of Swimmers. The Cliftons are loosely modelled on the English explorers Robert and Dorothy Clayton-East-Clayton, who both died young: Robert of illness in 1932 and Dorothy in a flying accident in 1933.
Almásy did work for Germany: in 1942 he guided two Abwehr spies across the desert to Egypt in Operation Salam, but the love affair and the betrayal of the expedition maps come from Michael Ondaatje's 1992 novel. The Italian scenes are set after the Allied advance through Tuscany in the summer of 1944, when British Commonwealth sappers such as Kip cleared the mines and booby traps the retreating Germans left behind.
Where to watch
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Full details
- Original title
- The English Patient
- Directed by
- Anthony Minghella
- Countries
- United States, United Kingdom
- Languages
- English, Italian, German, Arabic
- Released
- 1996
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- Mediterranean & Africa
- Themes
- Romance
- Espionage
