Michael Ondaatje

The film is set during World War II and depicts a critically burned man, at first known only as 'the English patient', who is being looked after by Hana, a French-Canadian nurse in a ruined Italian villa. The patient is reluctant to disclose any personal information but through a series of flashbacks, viewers are allowed into his past. It is slowly revealed that he is in fact a Hungarian geographer, Count Laszlo de Almasy, who was making a map of the Sahara Desert, and whose affair with a married woman ultimately brought about his present situation. As the patient remembers more, David Caravaggio, a Canadian thief/intelligence operative, arrives at the monastery. Caravaggio lost his thumbs while being interrogated by officers of the German Afrika Korps, and he gradually reveals that it was the patient's actions that had brought about his torture.