While Western viewers in the 1980s roamed the Soviet world following Mikhail Gorbachev, those inside the bloc were just as likely to be interested in a strange mass hypnosis artist named Anatoly Kashpirovskiy, as audiences at the Ji.hlava doc festival saw this week.
A trained doctor who said he first became fascinated with hypnosis to deal with medical students who slept during his classes, Kashpirovskiy became a cult phenomenon of epic proportions when state television channels began broadcasting his appearances.
For Polish director Lukasz Konopa, screening “Kashpirovskiy. Under the Spell” in Ji.hlava’s Testimonials section, this strangely fascinating man was part of the landscape of his childhood before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“Kaspirovskiy is one of my childhood memories. When I first saw him on television, I was seven years old and living in a small village in gray communist Poland. On the screen there was a strange man with black hair, speaking a language that I did not understand. Meanwhile, the light bulbs in our apartment were flickering mysteriously. As I later discovered, the electricity grid was under enormous pressure due to the enormous amount of electricity consumed by the bulky televisions of the time, because everyone was watching it at the same time.
Growing up, studying film in the UK and turning to a career as a filmmaker, he forgot the experience, he says, “until it came back to me during the first lockdown in 2020. I became curious about what happened to him. He played a very important role in the transition: the fall of communism and the early days of capitalism – a shift that changed everything in that part of the world.”
Konopa became convinced that Kashpirovski’s story was worth telling, he says, “especially in a time of political and social change that we are experiencing now.”
“When I started watching Kashpirovskiy’s sessions, I was surprised at how modern he looked. He reminded me of a contemporary life coach. He tells people everything will be okay and tries to give them advice on how to live their lives. Sometimes he literally says, ‘I’m going to hold your hand and guide you through this.'”
Konopa found the most interesting archival materials in Ukraine, where Kashpirovskiy began his career, he says. “Haunting, beautifully directed and filmed on 35mm. One element dates back to 1971: Kashpirovskiy in a doctor’s uniform. Kashpirovskiy riding a bicycle. Kashpirovskiy performing tricks and mesmerizing the audience at a kolkhoz (Soviet cooperative farm). It’s so strange that someone filmed Kashpirovskiy at this stage of his life, more than 15 years before he became famous.”
Kashpirovskiy, who has been called a hypnotist, healer, magician and conjurer, quickly became famous for such practices as operating on women without anesthesia and persuading Chechen leader Shamil Basayev to release 1,500 prisoners — events the director calls “some of the stunts that captivated millions of miracle-hungry citizens amid the desert of impending collapse of the perestroika and glasnost.
The “television medicine” experiment, Konopa says, was one of the first mass pop culture phenomena, reaching a Soviet audience of 300 million people.
Exploiting the surviving broadcast recordings has been a significant challenge, Konopa admits.
“Working with old Soviet archives is a bit like detective work. You never know exactly what’s out there, where to find it, and who owns it. Sometimes one discovery leads you to another, and suddenly you find something extraordinary.”
Working with a team of researchers in Ukraine, Poland, Georgia and the Czech Republic, Konopa managed to recover hundreds of hours of remarkable material, he says. HBO joined the production in 2025, providing critical funding for completion, the director said.
“Kashpirovskiy was already old and I felt we had to act quickly. With this funding, we didn’t have to interrupt the process. We were able to continue filming and collecting archival material without interruption, while I still had access to Kashpirovskiy.”
As to whether all or part of the Kashpirovskiy phenomenon was a scam, Konopa says, he concluded that his subject was “a master of stage hypnosis and psychological suggestion. For more than 25 years he perfected his art by giving seances and shows in factories, villages and collective farms.”
“He was really good at it. The way he looked and sounded on stage, the music he played, the script of his shows – all of that was carefully planned and executed. So I believe he could really put a lot of people into a trance or prevent them from feeling pain. His powers became even stronger when he got the most powerful platform of the time: television.”
Whether it was a hoax, Konopa says, “wasn’t the most important question to me. I was much more interested in the character he was creating and the image that television was building around him. I wanted the audience to be seduced by him and experience him in the same way people did at the time. That feeling of enchantment is the real story.”
Gn entert
