Fact: Fanny Kaplan was born in Odessa in 1890. She became a political activist and joined the Socialist Revolutionaries. In 1906, she was arrested for her participation in a failed plot to assassinate the governor of Kiev. She was sentenced to the katorga (a system of hard prison camps) and served time in several where he lost temporarily her eyesight. She was released in March 1917 by the February Revolution that overthrew the imperial government. Socialist Revolutionaries soon were in open conflict with the Bolsheviks and Kaplan decided to assassinate Vladimir Lenin. On August 1918 she fired at him when he left a meeting on the way to his car. Lenin was seriously wounded, survived but had health issues related to the attack ever since. Kaplan was captured and, under interrogation, she refused to identify possible accomplices and was executed. Her attempt on Lenin unleashed the Bolshevik's Red Terror under which thousands of opponents were arrested and executed sometimes on mere suspicions. There is no evidence she had any offspring.
Director Alena Demyanenko and cowriter Dmytriy Tomashpolskiy have taken what is known about Kaplan as starting points and connected the dots with fictional/conjectural but highly plausible material. The absence of evidence is attributed to the loss of several pages deleted from her dossier by the Cheka, the Soviet Secret Service of the time. One example is: the doctor who helped to treat her blindness was Lenin's brother (probably true) and Fanny had an amorous relationship with him (probably conjecture). Fact and fiction mesh smoothly and this movie, shot in Kiev and Odessa and spoken (mostly) in Ukrainian can be called a success. Acting is first rate, especially from Kateryna Molchanova (Fanny) who is on screen most of the time. Reconstruction of time and place is flawless and cinematography by Oleksii Moskalenko is excellent both in scarcely lighted interiors as in open air scenes. There are nice directorial touches such as lovemaking accidentally activating the clockwork of a bomb and the attempt on Lenin's life shown in reconstructed documentary style.
The original title of this movie is My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan. There are reasons to believe this movie is somewhat different since according to a Web source My Grandmother... opens with interviews with conjectural Fanny's grandchildren, which is not the case with the copy available in the streaming services and titled Her Name was Fanny.
