Original name: IDENTITA ES
English name: IDENTITY ES
Running time: 81 min.
Year of manufacture: 2022
Produced by: ARINA s.r.o., CINEART TV PRAGUE
Country: Czech Republic, Slovakia, Canada
Director: Alena Činčerová

The documentary brings the incredible life story of one of the world's most respected immunologists and geneticists, the Czech-Canadian Professor Emil Skamena. He devoted his whole life to uncovering the secret of genes, and at the same time he did not know his own identity for decades. Only by chance did he discover that he was someone completely different. After he left Czechoslovakia, he has been living in Canada for years. And quite exceptionally, they wear a small golden lily on their lapel as a knight of the line of the most important Quebecers. And above it, a round inconspicuous badge, an award from Britain's Queen Elizabeth for Canadians who are significant to the British Empire. Professor ES was born during II. of the World War in Bučača, Galicia, around August 1941. He doesn't know more precisely. He did not know his true identity for thirty years. He was born as Emil Kleiner, as a child of Jewish parents, as the son of the prominent Galician notary Benio Kleiner and his wife Gizela. His parents perished in the pogrom in 1943. Shortly before their death, however, they managed to arrange for their eighteen-month-old son to be transported to Prague by a difficult route. Out of 16,000 Bučac Jews, only four people survived the war. Behind Professor Skamen's lifelong endeavor is the desire to prove that saving his life was worth it.