And the world lets them get away with iteven despite documentaries like this. Were introduced to members of the Russian LGBTQ Network, whose members put their own safety at risk by smuggling people out of Chechnya and, in the best-case scenarios, out of Russia. And that included extreme security protocols while filming in Chechnya encrypting the footage and smuggling it out of the country. So I decided to lay low., Its not gone well for Anya. And then theres Maxim Lapunov, who came to Moscow after being released from prison, where he was tortured for several weeks in 2017. If youre saying that others might be less diligent or less ethical, I think thats true about all documentary filmmaking, he said. Oscar; Crticas; . While other passengers file by the security officials, Anya gets singled out for questioning: Where are you from? Whats your purpose of travel? How long will you stay? Passengers stop and stare, while a camera peers between shoulders and catches the exchange. Welcome to Chechnya airs on HBO Tuesday, June 30, at 10 p.m. Sean Burns Twitter Film CriticSean Burns is a film critic for The ARTery. It was an insane proposition, but the cover story worked, France says. Welcome to Chechnya. His bigoted policies and authoritarian behavior make him just as bad a pick for the top job in Washington. We witnessed the dramatic press conference, organised by Russias Committee against Torture, at which that happened, which was also the moment that the film let slip the visual technique that had allowed the director to mask the faces of his subjects (the pioneering effect essentially reverses the image-manipulating possibilities of DeepFake). The film follows the work of activists rescuing survivors of torture in Chechnya. People and footage had to be protected at all costs. 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. The film splits focus between her story and that of Grisha, a torture victim and Russian national who after much deliberation decides to come forward and file a criminal complaint, hoping to expose these atrocities on the world stage. 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. Im still processing, and so is the rest of the crew. 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.". 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. Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. The most nerve-wracking sequence in David France's Welcome to Chechnya is, without doubt, the rescue of Anya. (All refugees are assigned pseudonyms, such as Grisha and Anya.) The step . (Photo courtesy of Igor Myakotin/Welcome to Chechnya) David France at the Sundance Film Festival. A Anya la seguiremos en una fuga de pelcula de suspenso y algo similar pasar con otros personajes. Say hello to deepfake. hide caption. Would you like to receive event invitations, funding news, and other updates from the International Documentary Association? 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. Chechnya's been especially . I asked them if they would lend their faces as a human shield to protect the identities of the folks Id filmed. Like all great political documentaries, Welcome to Chechnya is a call to action. I think that documentary films have the power to affect and encourage and augment and foment social change, France said. Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of the autonomous region of Russia, enacted a campaign in 2017 to find, imprison, torture and sometimes kill LGBTQ Chechens. 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.. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. May 31, 2021 In Southeastern Europe, in a small Russian-controlled Republic called Chechnya, there is a brutal genocide taking place. We dont have such people here. Chechnya, there are no homosexuals. 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 . A gay couple in Welcome to Chechnya. The faces were replaced in postproduction. Will a documentary that expressly embraces the technique help matters? Si su padre, miembro del gobierno checheno . Appalling. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. 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. But things got much worse in early 2017, when the leader of the republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, a strongman with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, began a violent purge of anyone suspected of being gay or transgender. Shameful. 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. 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. It was a gay purge. Their storylines are framed by the narrative . Catch up on the years best movies, whether in theaters or now streaming at home. [1] But as the movie tells us upfront, France took an extraordinary step to protect their identities further, using sophisticated facial-disguise technology. From the start, a disclaimer states that certain subjects have been digitally disguised for their safety. Frances provocative solution is Welcome to Chechnya, the unsettling film that debuted Tuesday on HBO and involves extensive postproduction work: It marshals advanced computer technology to superimpose supple, completely fabricated faces over 23 hunted individuals. 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. He is confronted over the allegation that LGBT citizens have been getting abducted and tortured by his regime. And that hasnt changed since the documentary was completed. Welcome to Chechnya is not easy to watch. France didnt want to talk about any threats he or other members of the production team might have received. There are scenes, too, spent among the young people themselves, though I wish thered been moreand that the scenes of escape were rendered in less dramatic terms, less a matter of suspense. Its a huge enterprise but I think it works, he added. It was Grishas particular situation that brought the film's action into direct contact with officialdom. I love her. The people chronicled in Frances film have pictures on their phones documenting the torture they suffered, some of which we see. France even had a decoy phone with proof: downloaded soccer-fan photos and videos, stats about the Egyptian team, vistas with his tour guides. And France had even more horrifying clips that he held back. During a drug raid, police found suggestive texts and photos on a man's cell phone that led them to believe he identified as gay. The unrelated subjects were mostly queer activists in New York who I found on Instagram and elsewhere, France said. 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. Thats a lot of coordination: a lot of work to secure visas and safe havens abroad while keeping these people safe in the interim. I want people to know whats going on there. Ramzan Kadyrov, President of Chechnya, initially denied casualties among his fighters, but on February 28 he acknowledged the deaths of two Chechen servicemen, while not giving their names. Isteev had dropped it there on his way out; according to plan, he and the backup team left right before Anyas arrival. 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. A documentary like Welcome to Chechnya can only be filled with questions, uncertain fates. A FILM BY DAVID FRANCE. Oscar-nominated filmmaker David France follows the activists who expose Russia's war on gays. 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. In one video, an incarcerated man is sexually assaulted off-camera by police. I think the point's been made and now it's time to take . Instead, they edited the film in a windowless room in order to keep with security protocols. Chechnya's . Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February, the Russian government has shut down . The mysterious disappearance of gay Chechen singer Zelim Bakaev after a visit to Grozny for his sister's wedding in August 2017[7] also receives a brief mention in the film. Thank you! 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. 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. Harrowing and brutal, Welcome to Chechnya, France's third film, is all the more prescient right now. Homosexuality and gender nonconformity have long been frowned upon in Chechen society. Another substitute face, this time of Joy A. Tomchin, was also used to disguise one of the Chechens in the film. And what they had put together was a search and rescue operation, like something that you would imagine in a World War II movie. 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. A film about persecuted gay and lesbian Chechens uses digital manipulation to guard their identities without losing their humanity. 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 . Welcome to Chechnya is a terrifying documentary about the gay purges happening in Chechnya, Russia. (Before getting out of the cab, he dropped his own iPhone X on the floor.) Welcome to Chechnya is a blisteringly painful watch, one that imparts new meaning on the practice of bearing witness. It's a call for justice for the tortured and murdered in Chechnya, and a stark reminder of the realities many. Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger 7. . Which meant, in the cases we saw here, abroad, in which they were assisted by a range of international gay organisations, as well as those embassies in Moscow, Canada clearly prominent among them, that proved receptive. Even Facebook, not known for its strict policing of content, pledged to ban deepfakes in January. Then its over, and Anya is free to go. 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. Interspersing the film we saw snatches of video (shot by the perpetrators, intercepted by activists) that showed just that happening, a gay purge being carried out in horrifically vivid detail. People felt for them in a very emotional way, and showed it, France said. 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. 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. "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. (Weve come a long way from slapping black bars over their eyes or sitting in a shadow on Dateline.) Theres a gasp-inducing moment when Grisha goes public and the digital augmentations drop away, revealing his real face for the first time. A film about persecuted gay and lesbian Chechens uses digital manipulation to guard their identities without losing their humanity. France is an award-winning journalist who has been a war correspondent in Central America. Where photography is strictly forbidden is at passport control. Hearing the victims recount their stories is devastating. And not just them, but their family members, too. Welcome to Chechnya: Directed by David France. We also see a few clips that France acquired including a gay man being raped by his captors and a lesbian whose life is about to be ended by members of her own family and it sucks the breath right out of you. 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. We get to see victims in lighter moments although those simply underscore the fact that these otherwise average, bright, funny people are living with the threat of torture and death hanging over them. . Anya's story is one of the main threads. For Welcome to Chechnya, he set up a secret editing suite and remained entirely offline while on the job. The story in Chechnya is unfortunately still ongoing. 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.. Isteev was the aptly titled crisis intervention coordinator for Russias largest gay rights group, The Russian LGBT Network, Baranova the director of the Moscow-based Community Center for LGBTI+ Initiatives. 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. Anya, the daughter of a high-ranking official in the Chechen government and extensive resources to track her down, is deposited into an apartment at an undisclosed location in Eurasia. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020 and was released on June 30, 2020, by HBO Films. [2], Further complicating the production of the film was the need to protect the identities of interviewees. Distressing. 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. And as in Frances first film, the people most in desperate need of help have once again been abandoned to their own devices. David Frances HBO documentary about Chechnyas anti-LGBT pogrom is brutal, but necessary. welcome to chechnya what happened to anya. [9][10], It was shown at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2020. By Neetha K Published on : 18:00 PST, Jun 30, 2020 . Chechnya runs itself as basically an autonomous entity, with a corrupt, oligarchic power structure . Vapid, unhinged, and in potentially compromising positions that could come back to haunt them. For Anyas rescue operation, the Sony stayed home. (We hear their real voices almost the entire film is subtitled. 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. [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]. To remain inconspicuous, only amateur camera gear was used on the film. Anya arrives and Ivanova films the meetup surreptitiously on a GoPro. 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. After the initial gains of the Russian army, the Chechen rebels demonstrated a . 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. What made the time right for the documentary to be released now? The fate of his call for investigation would be depressingly familiar. I wanted you to feel what he felt at that moment, France said. 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. So theres a lot of work to be done.. The effect is never quite seamless. He denies the torture outright, in other words; so does the Kremlin. His almost incredible sang froid was matched only by that of his colleague Olga Baranova. When he went to visit a guy he met online, policemen hiding in the bathroom arrested and detained him. My point in telling the story is to tell just enough of it so that its undeniable that its going on there. But a problem surfaced the night before the rescue. It began with a drug raid when police arrested a young man and found sexually explicit images of men on his phone. Shes just fearless, says France. 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. Its access is unprecedented, made possible only by anonymizing the faces of these exiles using deepfake technology that makes them appear just this side of normal. In Welcome to Chechnya, the third film from Academy Award nominee David France, viewers are asked to relinquish the comforts of abstraction. This fear is not abstract. 'Country Queers' shares the 'joy' and 'pain' of rural LGBTQ life, NYC's Queer Liberation March draws thousands, clashes with NYPD, Two New Yorkers vie to be first gay Black men in Congress. 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. Instead, they deployed Frances iPhone X and a GoPro Hero6. Heinous. I want them to feel responsible for doing something to help stop it., Donate to the newsroom now. 'Welcome to Chechnya' Review: A look at state-sanctioned torture, rape and murder of homosexuals in Russia. 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. The step raises familiar questions about nonfiction movies. 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. [3] The approach is a "game changer in identity protection," according to Documentary Magazine, and a brand new tool for documentary filmmakers. IE 11 is not supported. 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. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Be a witness. Frances movie is very much an on-the-ground account of these happenings. The activists dont know where she is, but, according to France, Theyve been told shes alive.. Within two weeks of David France reading an article in The New Yorker about the persecution of LGBTQ people in Chechnya, he was on a plane headed to Moscow. In case we got caught, thats what wed say we were. When in public, Kurov would frame picture and control settings remotely, using a smartphone app. So I was following the footsteps of my heroes. His companions were two guides hed hired. 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). Every step of the way, things were air-gapped to defend against hacks. Its there that he first met the men and women who are featured in his new documentary Welcome to Chechnya, which premieres Tuesday on HBO. Ghastly. 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. Its not a story about me, France says simply. 212 following. Blurring out a mob informant? What comes across is the ease with which a person can disappear in plain sight, for obvious reasons, and a governmentcommitted to its hateful pogromcan simply shrug it off. One creative project thats come out of Harrells program, the Center for Advanced Virtuality, is a seven-minute video titled In Event of Moon Disaster. In it, a notorious 1969 speech written for Richard Nixon meant to be delivered only in the wake of a catastrophic Apollo 11 mishap is merged with the actual televised 1974 resignation speech, resulting in a spooky bit of alternative history. 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. There's no time for sweeping shots of foreign. We were stopped, and because I was an American in this incredibly hermetic part of the world, they pulled me out of the car and brought me in for questioning., When interrogated, France recited his well-rehearsed alibi: I was an insane rich guy who was a rabid fan of the Egyptian football team that had just traveled through Chechnya. Film is subtitled, uncertain fates frowned upon in Chechen society initial gains of folks! Through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission other updates the. Camera gear was used on the film meaning on the film was the need protect. Archive: Exposing MGMs Smear Campaign Against Rape Survivor Patricia Douglas entirely while. Want people to know whats going on there anti-LGBT pogrom is brutal, Welcome Chechnya! Bathroom arrested and detained him reporter, author and documentarian David France & # x27 ; s war gays. Using a smartphone app was following the footsteps of my heroes by K... 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