The Lady with the White Hat (1997)

• 60%
• 1997
• Documentary
• Aliona van der Horst

Odessa, 1996. When Hanna Michailenko, an Ukrainian school teacher, gets involved in the Samizdat underground movement in the eighties, she gets a visit from a KGB official telling her to work for them. When she refuses, she is confined to a harsh mental hospital in the city of Kazan an is drugged for 8 years, between 1980- 1988. She is set free by the efforts of Nancy Reagan. She is a mentally strong woman and very stubborn. She is the only one in Odessa who wears a white hat in winter: her fellow citizens don't like her to be so individualistic. During the Soviet times the psychiatry was often abused for locking dissidents up in mental wards. Often they were given forced medicine, even if they were not mentally ill. After the fall of the Wall, Semyon Gluzman, an Ukrainian psychiatrist, started to reform the system and giving the victims a voice. Hanna Michailenko speaks at a conference, full of former Soviet psychiatrists, about her life.