A mentor of Religa, Professor Waclaw Sitkowski, fought in Warsaw Uprising in 1944 during World War II. He died in 2010.
The film is based on real events and a person of a Polish cardiac surgeon Dr. Zbigniew Religa and his co-workers. After a fall of communism in Poland, in 1993 he was elected a senator, then in 2005 he was a Minister of Health.
Dr. Zbigniew Religa was a heavy smoker, what is depicted in the film, and eventually died in 2009 from lung cancer.
A co-worker of Zbigniew Religa, Marian Zembala, became a Minister of Health in 2015.
There are cameos of two main co-workers of Religa as members of bioethics commission: Marian Zembala (first from left) and Andrzej Bochenek (first from right).