David France's HBO film shines light on the brutal campaign by officials in the semi-autonomous Russian region to imprison, torture and sometimes kill gay men. Welcome to Chechnya is likely to be the most urgent documentary of the year, but makes many exploitative missteps along the way. Movie. He had seen television news interviews from the Russian, largely Muslim republic: the subjects were dimmed in shadows, their voices digitally altered, but he found it hard to connect with them. But I also want people to know what the conditions are for LGBTQ people around the globeThere are still 70 countries where its a crime to be queer, and eight of those countries, and several other semi-autonomous regions like Chechnya is, consider it a crime worthy of the death penalty., As international borders are closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the activists in Moscow need even more help. The operation begins in a fast-food restaurant. When you have a lack of the actual face, in most cases it will induce a sense of disturbance., But Welcome to Chechnya could represent the introduction of a new kind of soft mask, one that hides a subjects identity while still allowing for a complex emotional attachment. And hes drawing some hope from the ongoing protests against racism taking place across the United States and around the world. And I understood, of course.. It was very cumbersome, but necessary to keep my end of the promise, France said. and Anya, a young queer woman from Grozny, who wants to flee her powerful Chechen family. And I was outraged that they were being forced to do this all on their own, and that the world wasnt coming to pay attention to and put pressure against the Chechen government.". Documentarian David France faced an unenviable challenge with his latest film, "Welcome to Chechnya.". He was twisting balloons into these elaborate sculptures and selling them to people in front of the main mall in Grozny, Chechnya. Since 2016, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has led a pogrom against the . These are ghastly images, and I'm not convinced the film needed all of them to convey the full horror of what's going on. Eight years later, France has delivered a depressingly necessary companion piece, but where his previous pictures battles were settled history fought in archival footage, Welcome to Chechnya is ripped straight from the headlines, using iPhones and GoPros to take us behind the lines of a genocide happening here and now. I want people to know whats going on there. His film reveals the ongoing danger to LGBTQ Chechens targeted for persecution and death in a campaign to 'cleanse' the republic. The pre-existing material in "Welcome to Chechnya" is by far its most distressing: grainy cellphone and surveillance camera footage of real-life homophobic attacks in the republic, including a. I want people to be invested in it. The moment is extremely tense. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. According to Representative Billy Long, abortions, not guns, are the problem. Without them, you could be considered a spy and spend many years in prison. David Frances revelatory film may have been subtitled The Gay Purge, but from the start it was clear this wasnt just another documentary from Russia charting the increasing pressure faced by that countrys queer community. What our film proves is that this can be done in the right way., Deepfake Technology Enters the Documentary World, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/movies/deepfakes-documentary-welcome-to-chechnya.html. Welcome to Chechnya ends almost exactly as it begins, only a year later with a weary Isteev telling us this story still doesnt have an ending. Then he gets another call. . Their storylines are framed by the narrative . We werent just erasing cards; we were overwriting them to make the data irretrievable. Once the encrypted hard drive arrived in New York, theyd send word back to Russia to overwrite the two remaining drives. Then its over, and Anya is free to go. But I knew I wanted to tell a much more in-depth story about what something as hideous as this meant to the people who survived it.. Grisha was allowed out of prison because, apparently, hes from Siberia but the Chechen authorities later decided theyd made a mistake by letting a witness get away. Director David Frances 2012 How to Survive a Plague was to my mind one of the decades finest documentaries. I didnt want to create a reel of horrors, I wanted to underscore what had happened to the people who were in the film, France said. So last century. Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing, U.S. Chechnya, also spelled Chechnia or Chechenia, republic in southwestern Russia, situated on the northern flank of the Greater Caucasus range. The activists dont know where she is, but, according to France, Theyve been told shes alive.. Now we get to witness an actual extraction from Chechnyathe mechanics, the risks and the bravery involved. Together with various support initiatives, they had come to oversee a network that had arisen almost spontaneously back in 2017 to respond to what was happening in Chechnya. Their cover story is that Anya is meeting two family friends who are taking her dress-shopping. Instead, they deployed Frances iPhone X and a GoPro Hero6. When he made his first documentary, 2012's How to Survive a Plague, about the early AIDS activists in America, the director didn't hesitate to describe his protagonists there as heroes, for the way that they stood up for what they believed in, against adversity: it's an accolade that seems no less appropriate here. Its a human life, and she only had this one chance to run. Adding to the pressure, At this point, theres no second camera inside, so everything was on me., The next stress came at the roadside checkpoint, when security guards are troubled by one passport. It smiles, it cries in exactly the same way, but it is somebody elses face.. We dont have such people here. Thanks to the extraordinary access attained by France and company, were provided passenger seat views of daring midnight escapes and hair-raising trips through customs, with a percolating electronic score out of a Michael Mann picture. The cruelty is medieval, but the time is now. 50% of the Chechen population killed in 1944 and 200 000 Chechens killed (1/5 of the population) during the Chechen wars and hundreds of Chechens being assinated and going missing each year and no one gives a rats ass about Chechnya. The First Chechen War explains a lot of what Russia and Putin are doing in Ukraine today: On New Year's Eve, 1994 Russian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles poured into the streets of Grozny with an assault expected to snuff out the self-declared Chechcen Republic of Ichkeria, as black smoke poured into the sky from oil tanks set ablaze by a dawn artillery bombardment. At no time were lights or external sound gear used on the film, with two exceptions. Where do the new faces actually come from? Before Anya even set foot in the restaurant, Ivanova got a warning scrawled on a napkin. Playing the aunties are cameraperson Alexandra Ivanova and a female activist. The step . I tried to install the app, and it didnt work. That meant Ivanova was sneaking peeks or shooting blind throughout the operation. And as in France's first film, the people. Welcome to Chechnya, which premiered at Sundance in January and won the U.S. documentary special jury award for editing, is at once repellent and fascinating as were introduced to people whose lives are in danger because of their sexual orientation including some who have survived imprisonment, beatings and torture. I felt the lack of any sort of safety net, and that was very frightening. Speaking by Zoom from London, she summed up the swirl of emotions nervousness, liberation, even possible enlightenment set off by deepfakes arrival in the documentary world. Theres been an enormous amount of such spy cases since 2014.. The plan was for Ivanova to control her GoPro with a smartphone app, like Kurov did with his Sony. Another agonising airport moment came when Grisha flew to lasting safety abroad, accompanied not only by his boyfriend but by his family as well: the threats of the Chechen power structures extended so far in Russia that all concerned were in peril, and so had to be moved. There were times when we actually backed off on some areas, the machine did better or sharper, and we were concerned that we werent telling the audience that something was going on.. With Olga Baranova, David Isteev, Ramzan Kadyrov, Maxim Lapunov. Sign Up Now Welcome to Chechnya (HBO) Genres original, documentary Runtime 1 hr 47 min Release Year 2020 About This Movie To make matters worse, the GoPro screen would power off after one minute. Republican Congressman Blames Mass Shootings on Women Having Rights. A reckoning is essential for all of the crimes against human rights the smaller, less consequential ones like name-calling, the ones that are life altering and certainly the most extreme examples, like what we see happening in Chechnya, where its still going on, France said. from Anya, a 21-year-old threatened by her uncle to have intercourse with him, or he'll reveal her homosexuality to her father, a high-ranking official . sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. Chechen authorities let him go because he is not ethnically Chechen. Advocacy meets suspense in "Welcome to Chechnya," a chilling examination of both the brutality that the Chechen LGBT community is forced to face on a daily basis and the difficulty of leaving. Since 2016, Chechnya's tyrannical leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has waged a depraved operation to "cleanse the blood" of LGBTQ+ Searing urgency is a guiding force as Welcome . There are many people not identified at all, but the doc includes disturbing and graphic footage of them being beaten and tortured. And it restores to them their humanity in a way that would not have been possible under other circumstances., Still, why should we trust a documentary that uses deepfakes? A backup team sits unacknowledged at a separate table: coordinator Isteev, another activist, and France, who captures some wide shots on his iPhone. The fate of his call for investigation would be depressingly familiar. David Frances HBO documentary about Chechnyas anti-LGBT pogrom is brutal, but necessary. The Russian LGBT Network moves her into an apartment where she must hole up for weeks on end, waiting for a travel visa that might never arrive. Their operation, run from a discreet location that becomes a haven for escapees-in-wait, receives about 25 new refugees a month. And then theres the evidence we see for ourselves: cell phone footage of people being beaten and harassed. This happened shortly after Frontal journalists published their investigation Forced Adoption: The Missing Children of Kherson on the social network. Some of the men were released with the expectation that their own relatives would kill them, since the stigma of homosexuality runs deep in this ultra-conservative, primarily Muslim society. Although some didnt. The main location we saw was one of the Moscow safe houses that provided a temporary home for those en route to somewhere else; its routine of wary everyday life, interspersed by periodic departures for the airport, seemed almost normal until painfully broken by a traumatised young man attempting suicide. [11], The film received universal critical acclaim, holding an approval rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 72 reviews, with an average rating of 8.7/10. Many of the faces we see are actually the faces of people from outside Chechnya, who lent their likenesses to the film. Few people can publicly attest to this, because anyone who speaks out against Kadyrov becomes an automatic target of the Chechen government. After the initial gains of the Russian army, the Chechen rebels demonstrated a . People and footage had to be protected at all costs. Their identities are protected via a new form of digital masking, which similar to deepfake technology overlays the faces of others while preserving the camera subjects original expressions. Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically. Now, it must bring him down Jonathan Littell Putin believed he could invade Ukraine because everything we failed to do over the last 22 years taught him. France even had a decoy phone with proof: downloaded soccer-fan photos and videos, stats about the Egyptian team, vistas with his tour guides. Distressing. Keeping people in hiding, taking care of people, keeping them safe and fed, and with medical care for this long extended period, while theyre still struggling with foreign governments to try to keep open that back door to humanitarian parole visas, France said. 2022 International Documentary Association. 197 posts. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020 and was released on June 30, 2020, by HBO Films. France is an award-winning journalist who has been a war correspondent in Central America. Sometimes thats a tall order. "People in Chechnya who are suspected of being lesbian, gay or bisexual, are facing a 'new wave of persecution' following a spate of killings involving torture, and other rights abuses," a group. Anya's story is one of the main threads. T he anti-gay purge in Chechnya began in 2017. Im still processing, and so is the rest of the crew. Welcome to Chechnya is a terrifying documentary about the gay purges happening in Chechnya, Russia. (President Vladimir Putins government is itself decidedly anti-gay, and has turned a blind eye to the kidnappings, torture and murder of the Kadyrov regime.) He did say they have been concerned about safety at screenings, and that they took special safety precautions at Sundance to protect the people who appear in the film from any undue danger.. And my task was to convince them to let me shoot their faces and explore their journey, with a promise that I would find a way to disguise them.. And also to support Maxim Lapunov and his family in their lawsuit. All technology has a dual moral purpose, he argued. The pre-existing material in "Welcome to Chechnya" is by far its most distressing: grainy cellphone and surveillance camera footage of real-life homophobic attacks in the republic, including a. . Oscar-nominated filmmaker and former investigative journalist David France has a new documentary, Welcome To Chechnya, debuting on HBO June 30 th, which has already won multiple awards on the film festival circuit. Here is an ongoing crime against humanity that has not generated the outrage that it deserves, said France, who earned an Oscar nomination for How to Survive a Plague, his 2012 directing debut about AIDS activists in the early days of the epidemic. They were sent over WhatsApp groups up the chain of command, so that Ramzan Kadyrov would know that his orders are being carried out., And when you saw the footage, I realized that I wanted to take that away from them, and turn their trophies into evidence, he continued. And as in Frances first film, the people most in desperate need of help have once again been abandoned to their own devices. 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