SPERO

Produced and Directed by Mark de Valk

The "War on Terror" started 50 years ago...on the mind of a woman. IN 1953 the United States, Canada, and Britian signed the Nuremberg Code forbidding psychological torture and expirimentation on any citizenry. That same year the Central Intelligence Agency started Project MK-ULTRA. It is 1957 Montreal, Anne, a middle-class housewife, regresses into depression, sexual inhibition, and lack of self-worth after a stillbirth. Following three years of therapy and pills, Anne attempts suicide and is signed in to the prestigious Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute in Montreal where she becomes a patient of the world-eminent psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. Without her consent, Anne is subjected to strange and unconventional "treatment' : electro-shock, doses of LSD, and hour-upon- hour of drug-induced sleep while listening to repetitive verbal messages.

SPERO is a psychological drama set within the frenzied paranoid anti-Communist world of the 1950s; it excavates the dangers of political and military collusion and intrusion into the medical world in search of the ultimate 'mind-control" method.