The heart surgeon Christian Barnard shot overnight to fame as no other doctor before or thereafter, living the jet-set life of the rich and famous. However, Christian Barnard didn't write the great success-story of the first heart transplantation alone. Hamilton Naki who apparently played an essential role in night of the first heart tranplantation was «discovered» after the Apartheid, and was suddenly celebrated as an international hero just like Barnard.
Who was Hamilton Naki? Why did he suddenly claim be part of the first heart transplantation? What was he doing in the dark times of apartheid, the time between the first heart transplantation and his rise to fame? Hidden Heart tells the story of two men, glamour, social injustice and political uprising.
Cristina Karrer produced two documentaries for NZZ Format on Jemen and Aserbeidschan besides several abroad reportage on Tadjikistan and Kirgistan. 1991 she received the Zurich Journalist Prize for NZZ-Reportage. Today Cristina Karrer works as Afrika correspondent for Swiss Television based in Johannesburg. For Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduction she recently realized the TV Documentary «Forrests of Hope - Kenia» for Swiss Television & Arte.
Werner Schweizer worked as author and freelance journalist until 1989, when he realized his first cinema documentary. Since then he works as an author and director of documentaries for TV and Cinema. For the documentaries Dynamit am Simplon, Noel Field - The fictious spy and Von Werra he received several Prizes. Werner Schweizer graduated 1990 at the EAVE and works since then as producer at Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduction, Zürich.

Synopsis
December 1967 - a night that changed the world. The first human heart has been successfully transplanted in Cape Town, South Africa, a country where racial segregation was entrenched as nowhere else in the world. The heart surgeon Barnard shot overnight to fame as no other doctor before or thereafter. However, Barnard didn't write the success-story alone. Post-Apartheid 2001: International newspapers suddenly claim that Hamilton Naki, the gardener, was equally part of the sensational operation. Hidden Heart is a film about two men, glamour, injustice and uprising. Cape Town 1967: Christian Barnard transplanted the first human heart in a country where racial segregation was entrenched as nowhere else in the world. But behind him stood an unknown black man: Hamilton Naki.

Directors Note Cristina Karrer Dez. 2007
South Africa isn't just any country for me. I have lived in the city of Johannesburg since 2000;  since then this country grew on me. However, it is a complicated country. Racial discrimination has dissappeared from the law, but in many minds it is still present. Many, previously disadvantaged people still suffer. In South Africa's air there is lot of frustration and anger - mixed, however, with enthusiasm and the courage to create a new society. This dynamic mixture hasn't stopped exiting me.
The story of Hamilton Naki encompasses all those feelings in a nutshell. I was extremly impressed when I heard it for the first time. I was impressed by the man and his achievements. His home, the Eastern Cape, belongs to my favorite regions in South Africa. Its inhabitants may are poor, but nowhere else is the presence of the whites as reduced and the culture of the black people as original. Until now, it is very difficult for a person from the rural areas of the Eastern Cape to stem him- or herself out of poverty and to embark on a successfull career. Viewed in this light, the career of Hamilton Naki to me was even more astonishing.
The various reports about Naki, however were irritating. Their focus on the first heartransplantation and his respective role was too narrow and to sensational. His rise from a gardener to a laboratory assistant was pictured too smooth and too simplistic. My aim was to do a documentary which doesn't give any final answers regarding Naki's role with regard of the first heart transplantion - without frustrating the audience. I was hoping that the audicnce would be so impressed by the achievements of Hamilton Naki that his role in the first heart transplantion wouldn't be that important anymore.
I wasn't interested in Naki alone. To me, the story got really exiting by combining his biography with the one of Christian Barnard.  This presented the opportunity for a journey through South Africa's history. When I met the filmproducer Dirk de Villiers from Cape Town, i knew that i had found the perfect narrator. He has met both men, he is a gifted story-teller and he belongs to those few Afrikaaners who don't airbrush the past.
I have to admit that I will never fully grasp the nature of the two main characters, Naki and Barnard. They will always stay a bit enigmatic. From the onset, I felt emotionally closer to Naki because he was the victim; a symbol for oppression and late recognition. This fact. however, doesn't automatically turn Barnard into the bad one. It was of utmost importance to me to approach both of them with the same critical and open-minded curiosity - and this, indeed, seems to me the only way in South Africa to say good bye once and for all to all the entrenched preconceived notions which are still lingering around.

Hamilton Naki
Hamilton Naki was born in 1926 in Centani, a village in Transkei. Transkei lies in the Southeast and still today belongs to the poorest regions of South Africa. As a young boy Naki was fascinated by the organs that were laid open whenever a sheep was butchered. But as a black child in a country that defined its black population as inferior, he had no chance to develop this fascination further.
His path was prescribed through the system. After eight years of schooling, only two possibilities existed for him: breed sheep or migrate to Cape Town. Hamilton chose the second path. In his case this meant not the vacation resort basking before the sea with Table Mountain at its back, but the township Langa, which sprawls across the plain behind the mountain and acts as a retention basin for black laborers. Like most of the black natives Naki went to Langa alone. In Cape Town he found a position as a gardener at the Groote Schuur Hospital, where he tended the tennis courts. Doggedly he worked his way up to become a medical assistant in the animal laboratory, in which Christian and his brother Marius transplanted canine hearts.
Naki distinguished himself through dexterity and exactitude. He had a very specific gift. While Barnard achieved fame and honor, Naki continued to work in the hospital, where he--and not Barnard--instructed the more than 3000 physicians who made the pilgrimage from all over the world to Cape Town, in order to be initiated in the art of organ transplantation. He did not receive a raise in wage and continued to be paid the salary of a gardener. He lived in a room in Langa and provided for 24 relatives in his hometown with his lean wage.
He became famous after Barnard's death. In recognition of this contribution and for his role leading up to the first heart transplant, the University of Cape Town conferred an honorary degree on Naki, the first time in its history it had ever done so for someone without an academic background. Thabo Mbeki awarded him this most important national order. Naki died last year having had only a short time to enjoy his new-found fame.

Christian Barnard
Christian Barnard died in 2001 at the age of 78. He grew up in South Africa in the 20's as the son of a poor parson in Beaufort West, a quiet town called Karoo. His family were typically Afrikaans: they worked hard, the children ran barefoot over the «veld» (field), and they prayed at every meal. As a youngster, Christian Barnard appeared interested in the insides of living creatures. He always enjoyed telling the story of the first time he dissected a beetle.
He moved to Cape Town, where with discipline and ambition he studied medicine. Thanks to his good grades he received a scholarship for further training in the United States. From there he returned with a going-away present, which would influence his destiny: a heart-lung machine. Such a machine was crucial for a heart transplantation.
Around the world at that time there was a race to see who would be the first to succeed in transplanting a human heart. Christian Barnard and his brother Marius gained the necessary experience in an animal laboratory, where they--with a team of black assistants--transplanted dozens of canine hearts.
Barnard's victory in that race was owed to a mixture of luck and knowledge. Barnard had an ideal patient, and at the right moment he received a compatible donor heart from a young woman who had died in an car accident. The South African legal regulations--generous in contrast to those in the United States--allowed the transplantation. No one knew of the operation at first; the press was only informed on the following day. The second transplantation, which followed soon after, sparked even greater excitement. Barnard became a star over night! In the ensueing years he devoted himself less to research than to the amenities of being famous. He appeared to become a true ladies' man and married four times.
With his pioneering act he restored the internationally-ostracized Apartheid government to glamor and recognition. It is difficult to reduce Barnard's relationship to Apartheid to a common denominator. On numerous occasions, he voiced critical opinions regarding the individual aspects of Apartheid and fought against racial segregation in hospitals: yet at the same time he let himself be roped in by the government in the 1970's to serve as an unofficial ambassador for image bolstering purposes.
Only after 1994, after Nelson Mandela had made Apartheid a thing of the past, did he -- as so many «hardcore Afrikaans»--alter his posture. He spoke openly in front of cameras about how gifted his black assistant Hamilton Naki had been, and even that he had been better able to stitch and transplant than he himself.
A cardiac centre in Cape Town, bearing his name, and a museum in his hometown of Beaufort West stand in remembrance of him today. Christian Barnard and the transplant operation have been the subject of numerous books and films. It seems that his contradictory personality has remained an unending source of fascination.

Dirk de Villiers
Dirk de Villiers was a personality whose life was reflected in his furrowed visage and the sparkle in his eyes. At one time he owned eight homes and a motorboat. Due to poor investments he lost nearly all of his wealth and lived modestly during the last years of his life. He called himself a 'die-hard Afrikaan' and said that at the time he supported the idea of Apartheid, although he also had black friends.
He looked a bit like a seaman. This is no coincidence: before his career as an actor and director he travelled as a marine engineer. Dirk de Villiers met Christian Barnard in the mid-60's. The two were on vacation together when the news arrived that a donor heart had been found. He was also there when Christian Barnard was overwhelmed by fame. He tells of the ethical dichotomy that the successful operation meant for Barnard. As early as 1967, de Villiers had wanted to make a motion picture about Barnard, but the idea was never realized. Barnard was too unsure then whether what he had done was right. Following the revolutionary heart operation de Villiers did not see much of Barnard anymore. Only when the latter built his vacation home next door to de Villiers' did their paths cross again. Then, in 1996, de Villiers recalled his dream to film Barnard's life. The groundwork was laid with a long exclusive interview with Barnard, in which Barnard made known his admiration for Hamilton Naki's surgical talent. Although he owns the exclusive rights for that footage, de Villiers has until today still not been able to make a film - neither about Barnard nor about Hamilton Naki, whom he claims to have «discovered» after Barnard's death.
The old man's frustration is evident. The wealth he amassed as one of the most successful directors and producers of the Apartheid era (he shot and produced the first TV-films for the black population) is lost. Dirk de Villiers resided in a simple apartment in Cape Town and ran his production company from a modest office.
Last year he nearly succumbed to complications resulting from an operation.
But he was tough, and when he spoke one could listen for hours.

PROUDLY SOUTH AFRICAN FILMMAKING

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