Diagnosis: Dissent

Andrii Dovzhenko comes up against a truth. That truth had been hidden for years in the Soviet Union. Most of those accused of anti-Soviet propaganda were not sent to prison. They were sent to special psychiatric hospitals instead. The diagnosis given was slow progressive schizophrenia. Andrii finds himself inside that system. A hard choice comes before him. Either he works with the KGB and returns to his family. Or he makes public the truth about the dissidents tortured in those hospitals. The script rests on the memoirs of Soviet dissidents. Those memoirs tell how punitive psychiatry was used as a weapon. Kostiantyn Temliak and Nataliia Babenko take the leads, with Irma Vitovska and Ostap Stupka also in the cast, in Denis Tarasov’s Ukrainian film of 2024.