The Sleep Room (1998)

Directed by

Anne Wheeler

Country

Canada

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A Canadian psychiatrist conducts unethical experiments on mental patients using drugs and electroshock, funded by the CIA. Years later, the victims fight in court for justice and compensation.

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What happens

The Sleep Room is a 1998 Canadian television film about experiments on Canadian mental patients that were carried out in the 1950s and 1960s by Donald Ewen Cameron and funded by the CIA's MKUltra program. It originally aired as a miniseries and is based on the book In The Sleep Room: The Story of CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada by Anne Collins. The first half of the film details the evolution of Cameron's experiments using a procedure he called psychic driving which included continuous loop taped messages while the patients were under the influence of curare and LSD, as well as intensive electroshock treatments. The second half covers the legal efforts of the patients and their attorneys in the 1980s to obtain a settlement. The film was directed by Anne Wheeler and starred Leon Pownall, Macha Grenon, Nicola Cavendish, Donald Moffat, Diego Matamoros, Jean-Guy Bouchard, Emmanuel Bilodeau and Marina Orsini. It won several Gemini awards, including best television movie, best direction, best performance, best sound, and outstanding special effects in make-up. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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