While Western TV audiences of the 80s surveying the Soviet world were following Mikhail Gorbachev, those inside the bloc were just as likely to be interested in a bizarre mass hypnosis artist by the name of Anatoly Kashpirovskiy, as Ji.hlava doc fest audiences have seen this week.
\n\nA trained medical doctor who said he first became fascinated by hypnosis in order to deal with medical students sleeping through his lectures, Kashpirovskiy became a cult phenomenon of epic proportions once state television channels began to carry his appearances.
\n\nFor Polish director Lukasz Konopa, screening “Kashpirovskiy. Under the Spell” in Ji.hlava’s Testimonies section, the strangely compelling man was part of the landscape of growing up before the Soviet collapse, he says.
\n\n“Kaspirovskiy is part of my childhood memories. When I first saw him on television, I was seven years old and I lived in a small village in gray, communist Poland. On the screen was a strange-looking man with black hair, speaking a language I didn’t understand. Meanwhile, the light bulbs in our apartment were mysteriously flickering. As I discovered later, the electricity grid was under enormous strain due to the huge amount of electricity consumed by the bulky televisions of the…
Original source: https://variety.com/v/tv/