The operation begins in a fast-food restaurant. [1] The film centers on the anti-gay purges in Chechnya of the late 2010s, filming LGBT Chechen refugees using hidden cameras as they made their way out of Russia through a network of safehouses aided by activists. Verified. The step . I want them to feel responsible for doing something to help stop it., Donate to the newsroom now. Until it doesnt: In one of the films more breathtaking moments, the effects drop away after a gay refugee, Maksim Lapunov, reclaims his name and his real face at a news conference. And that hasnt changed since the documentary was completed. 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. 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. Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically. To have the savvy to negotiate a political media landscape where a video could potentially be a deepfake, or a legitimate video could be called a deepfake, I think those are cases people need to be aware of, he said. This documentary, which airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on HBO, shows us whats happening to gay people in that Russian republic and the rest of the Russian Federation and its deeply disturbing. (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.) It's there that he first met the men and women who are featured in his new documentary "Welcome to Chechnya," which premieres Tuesday on HBO. 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. One young man is fleeing because while he is not a citizen of Chechnya, he has spent time detained in one of its prisons for being gayand upon his release back to Russia, he became a threat to a regime that would rather the world buy into its denialism. 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 10 Best Movies of 2020 (So Far) Review: Spike Lees Da 5 Bloods Is Gold The Wild Life and Many Loves of Ava Gardner Inside Pete Davidson and John Mulaneys Make-A-Wish Friendship Now Streaming: Over 100 Years of Black Defiance at the Movies Is TV Sabotaging Itself With Shrinking Shows? From the Archive: Exposing MGMs Smear Campaign Against Rape Survivor Patricia Douglas. My point in telling the story is to tell just enough of it so that its undeniable that its going on there. On one level, of course, Welcome to Chechnya looked to be about exactly that and on a more extreme level than anything weve seen before. Bogdan Left, Grisha Right in "Welcome to Chechnya". Welcome to Chechnya airs June 30 at 7 p.m. He called it an underblur or halo, intentionally added so youll be aware of the manipulation. To watch Frances latest is to be confronted by the moral dimensions of documentary filmmaking and maybe something deeper, concerning the slippery nature of identity itself. 4,370 followers. So I decided to lay low., Its not gone well for Anya. Filmed between August 2017 and early 2019, "Welcome to Chechnya" focuses on LGBT people forced to flee Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia's North Caucasus. (The Get Out director Jordan Peele tried to raise awareness with an eerie deepfake of Barack Obama.) It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020 and was released on June 30, 2020, by HBO Films. I think that documentary films have the power to affect and encourage and augment and foment social change, France said. Ryan Laney, Frances visual effects supervisor and a 30-year veteran whose credits include Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), persuaded the director that a deep-learning computer process was the easiest answer, even on a documentarys tight budget. You can just put something like a book on top of the GoPro and it becomes invisible. She adds, You can always tell them you didnt understand.. In 2017, the Russian republic of Chechnya began what some news outlets have dubbed the gay purge, rounding up and torturing LGBTQ+ citizens at secret black sites. Will a documentary that expressly embraces the technique help matters? Luckily, they had enough faith in me. Nichols said he was won over by Frances film. But there's no doubting the depth of its fury and anguish on behalf of the victims and survivors we see and the many, many more that we don't. And France had even more horrifying clips that he held back. And while there initially isn't much background on the two fugitive subjects the 30-year-old "Grisha" and the 21-year-old Muslim lesbian "Anya" you quickly understand why. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. People felt for them in a very emotional way, and showed it, France said. Like most of the victims in Welcome to Chechnya, Grishas identity is hidden with deep fake technology. Its practically seamless more convincing than the de-aging in The Irishman, anyway and points to entire new worlds of possibility in documentary footage preserving peoples anonymity. So there was always this dark shadow of the violence that hung over every moment of the time that I was with them.. Among those aided by the network is 21-year-old "Anya," the daughter of a high-ranking Chechen official. France doesnt see it as opening a new can of worms so much as the same old one. We have group therapy sessions about it to process the work that we had gone through.. Members of the LGBTQ+ community are being systematically hunted, detained, tortured, and executed by Chechen authorities, civilians, and their own family members. And then theres the evidence we see for ourselves: cell phone footage of people being beaten and harassed. David France's daring documentary "Welcome to Chechnya" goes undercover to detail the actions of activists in response to the Chechen Republic's anti-gay purge. It was very cumbersome, but necessary to keep my end of the promise, France said. Disgraceful. 2023 Cond Nast. David Frances HBO documentary about Chechnyas anti-LGBT pogrom is brutal, but necessary. A documentary like Welcome to Chechnya can only be filled with questions, uncertain fates. We still dont know what happened; watching clips of him is unsettling, and seeing the Moscow exiles speculate as to what happened to him is unexpectedly moving. Did the Utah Legislature do enough to save the Great Salt Lake? It began with a drug raid when police arrested a young man and found sexually explicit images of men on his phone. When he went to visit a guy he met online, policemen hiding in the bathroom arrested and detained him. We dont have such people here. It comes midway through the HBO documentary that premieres June 30, so we've already met the Russian LGBT activists who help Chechen gays and lesbians flee the republic's anti-gay purge. [4] To protect the identities of the interviewees, they could not move the footage across the internet nor work on it in an open studio setting. Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. They were horrible stories and theres no doubt that they were real, France, an Oscar-nominated activist filmmaker, said. Would you like to receive event invitations, funding news, and other updates from the International Documentary Association? In the Russian republic of Chechnya, the gay community has been hunted. Anyone can read what you share. Olga Baranova, from left, David Isteev, director David France, and Maxim Lapunov pose for a portrait to promote the film "Welcome to Chechnya" during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on Jan. 26, 2020. LDS Church wants to light up a temple in a place that prides itself on dark skies, For husband-and-wife team, this new restaurant is the culmination of a decadeslong dream. After some chitchat, the women leave by taxi for the airport. He is confronted over the allegation that LGBT citizens have been getting abducted and tortured by his regime. Welcome to Chechnya (HBO): An inside look at a group of activists risking their lives to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ campaign in the Russian republic of Chechnya. / how old is aiger in beyblade burst rise / welcome to chechnya what happened to anya By 21 Feb 2022 Everyones nervous, knowing that at any minute Anyas name could appear on a federal wanted list. Its not legal to encrypt in Russia, so we were taking a risk, France notes. Everyone in Russia is buried in their phones, says France, so Kurov following suit wouldnt raise any suspicions. This is nonsense, he says. May 31, 2021 In Southeastern Europe, in a small Russian-controlled Republic called Chechnya, there is a brutal genocide taking place. The activists are sure to remind us that this violence affects more than just cisgender gay men; the regime is equally perilous for cis women and trans people, though these other stories dont seem to travel nearly as far. The cruelty is medieval, but the time is now. Now Streaming. On location, the team followed strict protocols with footage. By K. Austin Collins June 30, 2020 There's a clip, in David France 's Welcome to Chechnya, of a 2017 interview with Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. Looking for more? He had been in Chechnya for work when he was caught and tortured by the police, his difference in circumstances principally the fact of his being an ethnic Russian meant that he was released finally giving him the courage to go public about what had happened and demand that the authorities investigate. Many who survived imprisonment have fled to Moscow, where they live in a safe house while seeking political asylum in other countries. This is the kind of film destined to be on "essential" documentary lists for decades to come, the kind we will look back on as critical documentation of a historic wrongdoing. Patricia Thomson is a longtime film journalist and contributing writer for American Cinematographer. Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of the autonomous. 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