Sign Up Now Welcome to Chechnya (HBO) Genres original, documentary Runtime 1 hr 47 min Release Year 2020 About This Movie The three films Ive made are about a kind of a radical kind of queer activism, that I think really leads the world in bringing a kind of a love-based activism to these really awful issues and making a difference, France said. It was Grishas particular situation that brought the film's action into direct contact with officialdom. Movie. Chechnya's leader Ramzan Kadyrov is a Putin stooge straight out of central casting, coyly egging on the atrocities in his ridiculous weightlifter shirt. And in 70 countries across the globe where its still illegal to be gay. His second documentary, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), focuses on a self-described drag queen and one of the leaders of the Stonewall uprising whose death in 1992 was ruled a suicide by police despite considerable evidence she was killed. And the world lets them get away with iteven despite documentaries like this. But I found it remarkably effective in the way it lets these young men and women tell their stories and express a level of emotion that would have been lost if they had been filmed with blurred faces or in heavy shadows. Welcome to Chechnya pays important tribute to the courage of its subjects, including activists like Isteev and Baranova, who risk their own persecution and exposure. Im still processing, and so is the rest of the crew. Quite popular in Russia, GoPro is a camera everybody can have, with no questions asked, Ivanova says. In 2017, the closed Southwestern Russian republic of Chechnya became the center of a massive human rights crisis when the government started arresting, abducting, killing, and torturing LGBTIQ+ . I want them to feel responsible for doing something to help stop it., Donate to the newsroom now. welcome to chechnya what happened to anya. David wanted to tell the story as quickly and urgently as possible; there are enough examples, definitely. There is, for example, the case of a woman they call Anya, whose father is a high-ranking official in Chechnya and whose uncle has threatened to tell her father about her sexualitya death sentenceunless she sleeps with him. Similarly harrowing, but also more hopeful, is the experience of a 30-year-old Russian businessman, here called "Grisha," who was detained and beaten for 12 days during a trip to Chechnya. Two of these operations frame the narrative of Welcome to Chechnya: the exfiltration of a 21-year-old woman with the pseudonym Anya, whose uncle learned she is lesbian and threatened to expose her . 21 . Data was immediately moved off-camera cards and loaded in triplicate onto encrypted drives; one was smuggled out of the country and two remained hidden in Russia. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. We see some of those abuses in the movie's most disturbing footage, much of it secretly filmed on cell phones and spliced into the film in brief jolts. One of the most powerful moments in the documentary, "Welcome to Chechnya," premiering June 30 at 10:00 pm on HBO, has a young gay man recalling his arrest and torture. 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. The face moves exactly the same way. All rights reserved. We dont have any gays. If there are any, he continues, they ought to be eradicatedsent to Canada, for the sake of purifying the country. ), Everybody understood the importance of telling the story. 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. Chechnya's . 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. The fate of his call for investigation would be depressingly familiar. So she held the GoPro low, shielding it with her other arm, or made sure to tuck it behind a coffee cup. The activists intercepted numerous videos, captured on cell phones, of people being tortured, attacked on the street and even raped. "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. In Russia, this equipment needs certain certifications and permissions. 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 . Many of the faces we see are actually the faces of people from outside Chechnya, who lent their likenesses to the film. These people are not professional movers: they are former journalists and photographers, artists, academicsnone of whom had experience with helping people covertly escape oppressive regimes, until they did. What made the time right for the documentary to be released now? It was a theory, and then it worked better than we ever expected, Laney said of the painstaking yearlong visual work, which he likened to brush strokes, facial prosthetics and virtual cheek implants. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. The target is Anya (a pseudonym), whose plight is revealed at the films start: Pleading for help in a phone call to Russian LGBT Network crisis response coordinator David Isteev, she explains that her uncle is threatening to reveal her lesbianism to her fathera high-ranking government officialunless she has sex with him. He is confronted over the allegation that. And hes drawing some hope from the ongoing protests against racism taking place across the United States and around the world. Without that outrage, it will keep going. And that hasnt changed since the documentary was completed. For example, we hear within the opening few minutes the testimony of a young Muslim girl (named "Anya", although all names have been changed) whose sexuality has been discovered by her uncle, who vows to tell . If anything, the activists tell us, the women need more help escaping. 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.. The computer did not have the capacity to touch the internet, France says. The effect is never quite seamless. 212 following. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS), also colloquially known as the Television Academy, is a professional honorary organization dedicated to the advancement of the television industry in the United States.It is a 501(c)(6) non-profit organization founded in 1946, the organization presents the Primetime Emmy Awards, an annual ceremony honoring achievement in U.S. primetime television. "We don't have such people here," declares Ramzan Kadyrov, chuckling . [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. Certain hyped-up scenes, with their insistent music and TV expose vibe, fall flat precisely because they add an energy that this situation, an outright tragedy, shouldnt need in order to make its point. We witnessed Anyas extrication from Chechnya across the mountains, the first step in an evacuation that saw her moved to temporary safety in the hinterland of a neighbouring country (her journey would go no further, not the only example where family coercion or other intervention would prove more powerful than fear). . Chechnyas leader Ramzan Kadyrov is a Putin stooge straight out of central casting, coyly egging on the atrocities in his ridiculous weightlifter shirt. The people chronicled in Frances film have pictures on their phones documenting the torture they suffered, some of which we see. (Before getting out of the cab, he dropped his own iPhone X on the floor.) Like all great political documentaries, Welcome to Chechnya is a call to action. They have grim stories: of being captured by police, of getting questioned over their phone contacts, of being driven to those contacts homes and forced to aid the police in their respective capture. Unlike the others, Grisha is unmasked late in the film when he goes before cameras to testify about whats happening in Chechnya. None of that is included in the film. Without them, you could be considered a spy and spend many years in prison. And France had even more horrifying clips that he held back. 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. Kadyrov and his security forces have been widely accused by international human rights groups of extrajudicial arrests, torture and killings. Welcome to Chechnya chronicles the persecution of LGBTQ youth in this ultra-conservative society. June 30, 2020. HBO's chilling "Welcome to Chechnya" depicts the heroism of ordinary people caught in an LGBTQ purge Director David France's riveting documentary never feels safe as he illuminates a world of. (France did insist, however, on 4K for cinematic lift.). A checkpoint is en route. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Chechnya is bordered by Russia proper on the north, Dagestan republic on the east and southeast, the country of Georgia on the southwest, and Ingushetiya republic on the west. So last century. [9][10], It was shown at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2020. France, a former Newsweek editor turned filmmaker (How to Survive a Plague, 2012), bristles at the term, a portmanteau of computer-assisted deep learning and fake., Deepfake changes what people say and do, France said. He was tortured by. Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. It was a gay purge. Ad Choices. Anya arrives and Ivanova films the meetup surreptitiously on a GoPro. 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. 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. After some chitchat, the women leave by taxi for the airport. David France on His Chilling HBO Documentary Welcome to Chechnya, "Gay man takes Russia to Europe's rights court over Chechnya LGBT+ attacks", "New Reports of Gay Singer Abducted and Murdered in Chechnya", "The 18 Movies We're Dying to See at Sundance", "Final days of Adelaide Film Festival serves up more winners", "Sundance Film Festival Awards: 'Minari' Scores Double Top Honors The Complete Winners List", "Zmagovalec obinstva na 36. festivalu LGBT filma", "GLAAD Unveils Nominees For 32nd Annual GLAAD Media Awards; Deadline's New Hollywood Podcast Honored With Special Recognition Award", "VES Awards Nominations: 'Tenet', 'Midnight Sky', 'Extraction', 'Soul' & 'Mandalorian' Among Titles In Visual Effects Hunt", "BAFTA TV 2021: The Winners and Nominations for the Virgin Media British Academy Television Awards and British Academy Television Craft Awards", "Ted Lasso, The Handmaid's Tale, and Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist lead Inaugural HCA TV Awards Nominations Hollywood Critics Association", BAFTA TV Award for Best International Programme, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Welcome_to_Chechnya&oldid=1132475176, Documentary films about violence against LGBT people, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, U.S. Oscar-nominated filmmaker David France follows the activists who expose Russia's war on gays. It was an insane proposition, but the cover story worked, France says. Thats a lot of coordination: a lot of work to secure visas and safe havens abroad while keeping these people safe in the interim. Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of the autonomous. For Welcome to Chechnya, he set up a secret editing suite and remained entirely offline while on the job. Homosexuality and gender nonconformity have long been frowned upon in Chechen society. 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. [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.[1]. Appalling. Because they are still in safe houses, and they are still pursuing this suitTheres no telling how long that battles going to last, but theyre in it for the long run., Lapunov was able to feel some of that support when he traveled to the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year for the docs premiere. For many, simply walking out of Chechnya isn't an option. 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. We beat this thing up a bit, put tape on it, disabled all the red lights, and made it look like it belongs to somebodys child. Or a tourist. Its not a story about me, France says simply. His entire family has to be moved. How would he shield the identity of at-risk gay and lesbian Chechens fleeing the region via a network of safe houses, while also preserving their emotions, their affections and expressions? I wanted you to feel what he felt at that moment, France said. 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. The story that it followed had started back in 2017, with a crack-down by the authorities in the southern republic of Chechnya that saw widespread police torture of gay men; in a society where concepts of family shame and honour killing remain absolutely real, victims were then handed over to their families, most probably to be murdered by them, the same fate awaiting women as well. Horrific. 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. But politicians have become targets, too. People and footage had to be protected at all costs. In one video, an incarcerated man is sexually assaulted off-camera by police. Before Anya even set foot in the restaurant, Ivanova got a warning scrawled on a napkin. I think that documentary films have the power to affect and encourage and augment and foment social change, France said. 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. IE 11 is not supported. [3] The approach is a "game changer in identity protection," according to Documentary Magazine, and a brand new tool for documentary filmmakers. Isteev had dropped it there on his way out; according to plan, he and the backup team left right before Anyas arrival. For security reasons, these individuals are introduced with aliases, and their circumstances and whereabouts are left deliberately vague. Welcome To Chechnya (2020): Official Trailer | HBO. All technology has a dual moral purpose, he argued. The films production was obviously clandestine, guerilla filmmaking to a tee, with director France and his cinematographer Askold Kurov seeking invisibility as they worked with handheld cameras, and catching what they could on phones when that was the only way to operate. Nichols said he was won over by Frances film. One of these digitally altered subjects is a 21-year-old lesbian introduced as "Anya," whose uncle knows her sexual orientation and demands that she sleep with him or risk being outed to her father, a powerful Chechen official. 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. Anya and her car of dress-shoppers got through. She has never been at home alone before but must wait indoors, as the activists try to arrange for any country to take her in. Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday! Those are the stories that have really fascinated me the way that their activists handle these challenges and the specter of death. A film about persecuted gay and lesbian Chechens uses digital manipulation to guard their identities without losing their humanity. May 31, 2021 In Southeastern Europe, in a small Russian-controlled Republic called Chechnya, there is a brutal genocide taking place. My point in telling the story is to tell just enough of it so that its undeniable that its going on there. He was twisting balloons into these elaborate sculptures and selling them to people in front of the main mall in Grozny, Chechnya. 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. He embedded himself with Isteev and another activist, Olga Baranova, and began filming some of the young people who turned to them for help. It comes midway through the HBO documentary that premieres June 30, so weve already met the Russian LGBT activists who help Chechen gays and lesbians flee the republics anti-gay purge. Welcome to Chechnya chronicles the persecution of LGBTQ youth in this ultra-conservative society. HBO. 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. And that included extreme security protocols while filming in Chechnya encrypting the footage and smuggling it out of the country. It was my passport they grabbed, and my passport they argued over, says France, who managed to capture this nail-biting episode with an iPhone clutched between his knees. The film premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival,[8] and screened at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival. The moment is extremely tense. His method essentially involved filming unrelated subjects in a studio with a nine-camera array capturing their faces from all angles. 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.". 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. Oscar; Crticas; . Welcome to Chechnya notes that, under the Trump administration, the United States had not accepted any refugees from Chechnya or the Russian Federation who were fleeing persecution, torture and death because of their sexual orientation. What we did was to borrow from the world of deepfakes and find this social justice use for it, he explained. One in particular sticks with me: a pop singer named Zelim Bakaev, who disappeared in 2017 and is thought to been captured, tortured, and murdered after attending his sisters wedding. He called it an underblur or halo, intentionally added so youll be aware of the manipulation. And they signed on as an act of activism.. But the greater part of the action of Welcome to Chechnya was caught on the move, with a disturbingly convincing tension, as the film followed various strands as they developed, unpredictably, in real time (its a considerable achievement, not least in editing, to make such an approach convincing rather than contrived). Thats where he was seized by the security agents. His bigoted policies and authoritarian behavior make him just as bad a pick for the top job in Washington. All of the above. D. Fox Harrell, professor of digital media and artificial intelligence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said there was an educational potential in synthetic media, the term he prefers to deepfake redeeming it from mere deception. That's David Isteev, a journalist turned activist at the start of Welcome to Chechnya, a devastating documentary about the Russian Federation republic's purge of its LGBTQ+ population. Welcome to Chechnya is not easy to watch. Now we get to witness an actual extraction from Chechnyathe mechanics, the risks and the bravery involved. "[12] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 86 out of 100 based on 17 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[13]. When he went to visit a guy he met online, policemen hiding in the bathroom arrested and detained him. Chechnya's been especially . A gripping account of ACT UP and TAGs extraordinary lifesaving efforts during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the film chronicled a community left to fend for itself in the face of mass medical negligence and societal indifference. To remain inconspicuous, only amateur camera gear was used on the film. I felt the lack of any sort of safety net, and that was very frightening. But the real subject of Frances film was something else, something (perhaps) more surprising, and (definitely) more life-affirming how, even in such bleak circumstances, there were people prepared to do something about what was happening. Their operation, run from a discreet location that becomes a haven for escapees-in-wait, receives about 25 new refugees a month. Welcome to Chechnya is likely to be the most urgent documentary of the year, but makes many exploitative missteps along the way. Jimmy Kimmel Roasts Fragile Snowflake Donald Trump for Allegedly Trying to Censor Him, Ghostwriting Gloria Swanson: The Strange, Sexually Charged Genesis of a Legendary Autobiography, Ezra Millers Messiah Delusions: Inside. Welcome to Chechnya pays important tribute to the courage of its subjects, including activists like Isteev and Baranova, who risk their own persecution and exposure. The camerawork is rough and ragged; the sense of menace is palpable. (All refugees are assigned pseudonyms, such as Grisha and Anya.) It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020 and was released on June 30, 2020, by HBO Films. Its footage that was shot as trophies by the people who committed those crimes. The mere presence of France's camera might endanger their lives and their work, but it's also crucial to drawing international attention to the Chechen government's abuses. In a sense, Welcome to Chechnya is an applied special effect that lasts an entire movie. The documentary's use of digital technology to disguise its vulnerable subjects, and hence avoid putting them into an even more dangerous predicament, is surprisingly unobtrusive. France doesnt see it as opening a new can of worms so much as the same old one. Verified. Eventually he opted for advanced facial replacement techniques using artificial intelligence and novel visual effects technology so the viewer could see real faces displaying real emotions while still protecting the identities of the speakers. "Welcome to Chechnya" es un urgente documental que destaca a valientes activistas rescatando a personas gay del exterminio en Chechenia. welcome to chechnya what happened to anya are there tigers in andaman and nicobar islands? It said that people in the caf saw the camera and had become nervous about it, that I should hide it better, Ivanova recounts. 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. Thanks to a toxic brew of nationalistic fervor, Putins gay propaganda law and some good old-fashioned religious fundamentalism, homosexuals have been scapegoated as disgraces only blood can cleanse, in many cases becoming victims of honor-killings by their own families. What I learned from that story in The New Yorker was that the crimes that had been exposed earlier in the year hadnt stopped, that nothing about the exposure in the world media, nothing about the expressions of outrage from European leaders, nothing about the meek, near silence from the Trump administration had done anything to slow the campaign that was being carried out by the leadership in Chechnya against the LGBTQ community, France tells Variety. Would you like to receive event invitations, funding news, and other updates from the International Documentary Association? So there was always this dark shadow of the violence that hung over every moment of the time that I was with them.. And not just them, but their family members, too. When we learned of that footage, it was shocking, France said. Welcome to Chechnya (2020) Plot Showing all 3 items Jump to: Summaries (2) Synopsis (1) Summaries A group of activists risk their lives fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in Chechnya. Tushayev was responsible for kidnapping, torturing and murdering LGBTQ+ people. And what they had put together was a search and rescue operation, like something that you would imagine in a World War II movie. Grisha now going by his real name, Maxim may have had his identity finally restored, but the fate of his call for investigation would be depressingly familiar, refused in another rote court decision (his fight for justice continues at the European Court for Hight Rights). Their cover story is that Anya is meeting two family friends who are taking her dress-shopping. Anya is just a pseudonym for is one of the many who have fled the Chechen Republic as they faced persecution by the government due to their orientation. 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. By Neetha K Published on : 18:00 PST, Jun 30, 2020 . This visual strategy has a curious effect: you look at people without really being able to see them. Its got a beautiful lens on it, says the director, but it looks like a toy. 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