A Soviet TV Hypnotist Gets a Documentary, Screening at Ji.hlava
A new documentary about Anatoly Kashpirovskiy, a Soviet-era hypnotist who became a television cult figure, is screening at the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic.
The film, Kashpirovskiy. Under the Spell, was directed by Polish filmmaker Lukasz Konopa. It is listed in the festival's Testimonies section with a running time of 87 minutes, according to the festival's programme.
Kashpirovskiy's appearances were carried by state television channels, and that exposure turned him into a cult phenomenon. He was a trained medical doctor. He said he first got interested in hypnosis because medical students kept falling asleep during his lectures. Konopa said Kashpirovskiy's "television medicine" experiment reached a Soviet audience of 300 million people.
Konopa said he first saw him on television at the age of seven, while living in a small village in communist Poland. He later studied film in the United Kingdom and built a career as a cinematographer, the person who shoots a film's images.
Finding the old footage took years of digging. Konopa worked with researchers in Ukraine, Poland, Georgia and the Czech Republic to track down hundreds of hours of archive material. He said the most striking pieces were in Ukraine, where Kashpirovskiy began his career. One surviving piece of 35mm film, dating to 1971, shows him in a doctor's uniform, riding a bike and hypnotising an audience on a collective farm, known in the Soviet Union as a kolkhoz.
The film also deals with some of the stories that followed him. Variety reports that he became known for practices including operating on women without anaesthetics, and for persuading Chechen leader Shamil Basayev to release 1,500 prisoners.
The project also had outside money. HBO joined the production in 2025 and provided completion funding, the money needed to finish a film after shooting has started. HBO's involvement was reported by Variety.
Ji.hlava describes the film as a surreal look at the life of a hypnotist, healer, magician and conjurer, portraying a half-forgotten star of the Eastern Bloc. The film's festival page gives that description.
The festival itself runs from 23 October to 1 November 2026. It calls itself one of the key European festivals and the largest festival of auteur documentary cinema in Central and Eastern Europe, where "auteur" means films shaped mainly by their director's personal vision.
For a viewer who grew up with a single state channel, Konopa's story is a useful reminder of how far one broadcast could reach. Seven-year-old Lukasz in a Polish village was one of the many people watching.
