So I decided to lay low., Its not gone well for Anya. I said Yes, okay! and continued shooting after a moment. My point in telling the story is to tell just enough of it so that its undeniable that its going on there. These are the images being broadcast by Russian propaganda channels, leveraging the very presence of Chechen. France wanted to put a real human face on the story, so conventional techniques of disguising one's appearance, such as blurring their faces, filming them in darkness or hiring actors to stage re-enactments were not enough. Verified. So I became a selfie queen, says France. 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. None of that is included in the film. Its got a beautiful lens on it, says the director, but it looks like a toy. After six months of quarantine in a safe house awaiting a visa, she lost hope and left. Its an essential part of our total cultural history: the face as window, the core of our identity, the most distinguishing feature of the body, said Bill Nichols, professor emeritus at San Francisco State University and a pioneer in the field of documentary studies. But its much more meaningful. Everyone in Russia is buried in their phones, says France, so Kurov following suit wouldnt raise any suspicions. Like all great political documentaries, Welcome to Chechnya is a call to action. Saudi jihadist Ibn al-Khattab staged a devastating ambush of a Russian convoy at Shatoy on April 16 that prompted the . And this changes nothing. 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. Some strange people came to my flat and spoke with my mom. 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. Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter for The Kyiv Independent, tweeted: "Magomed Tushayev, one of . 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. In Welcome to Chechnya, the third film from Academy Award nominee David France, viewers are asked to relinquish the comforts of abstraction. This technology allowed us to just stretch the facesover the images that I shot in the film. [9][10], It was shown at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2020. 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). Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing, U.S. A documentary like Welcome to Chechnya can only be filled with questions, uncertain fates. Managing to extricate men and women from there, they looked after them in safe houses in Moscow and elsewhere, before finally in the best outcome, at least relocating them to where they could live in safety. If anything, the activists tell us, the women need more help escaping. 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. 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. Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. 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. The film follows the work of activists rescuing survivors of torture in Chechnya. Unlike the others, Grisha is unmasked late in the film when he goes before cameras to testify about whats happening in Chechnya. and Anya, a young queer woman from Grozny, who wants to flee her powerful Chechen family. This fear is not abstract. Filmmaker David France goes inside what can only be called a genocide that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has unleashed against his LGBTQ citizens. 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. Everyones nervous, knowing that at any minute Anyas name could appear on a federal wanted list. 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. I want people to be invested in it. 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. The step . 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 . He denies the torture outright, in other words; so does the Kremlin. Every step of the way, things were air-gapped to defend against hacks. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. People and footage had to be protected at all costs. 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. Heinous. 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.. (Pavel Golovkin | AP file photo) Chechen regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov smiles prior to President Vladimir Putin's annual state of the nation address in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Dec. 1, 2016. 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 . Theres a clip, in David Frances Welcome to Chechnya, of a 2017 interview with Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. In another, a woman is attacked by a relative who it's implied but not shown proceeds to bludgeon her to death. Welcome to Chechnya is a grimly ironic title for a documentary that plays like a chilling undercover thriller. 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. The darkness was painfully visible throughout Welcome to Chechnya, but France somehow managed to close the film in light a beam, however tentative and hesitant, that nevertheless shone through with affirmation. I felt the lack of any sort of safety net, and that was very frightening. When the documentarian David France decided to chronicle the anti-gay and lesbian purges that had unleashed a wave of fear and violence in Chechnya, he needed more than just a camera. They were keepsakes from these horrible events, and they were also deliverables. 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El caso central de WELCOME TO CHECHNYA no es el de Anya sino el de Maxim, cuya complicada historia -que incluye a su pareja, familia y varias idas y vueltas- se ir contando a travs del film e incluye muchos elementos dramticos ms. Welcome to Chechnya follows the stories of some of the gay men and women attempting to move to safety. We meet survivors and their family members, including Grisha, who was beaten and tortured for 12 days so badly injured he could only crawl afterward. Despite this, she managed to capture all the essentials. 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. Read that word, and digest what it means. He is confronted over the allegation that. 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. All technology has a dual moral purpose, he argued. (Courtesy of HBO) "Welcome to Chechnya" premieres Tuesday on HBO. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically. The fate of his call for investigation would be depressingly familiar. People were "disappeared.". 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. Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story. It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email. I asked them if they would lend their faces as a human shield to protect the identities of the folks Id filmed. 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. ET on HBO. 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. On March 1, Ukrainian Armed Forces wrote on Twitter that Magomed Tushayev, a pro-Putin Chechen general who led the gay purge in Chechnya, was killed in Ukraine. And Im still on it. Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya's brutal leader, making a defiant promise to seize Kyiv. The found footage of attacks on members of the Chechen LGBTQ community illustrates the level of terror victims experienced and what might happen to them if they got caught. 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. 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. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. HBO Max So theres a lot of work to be done.. Frances movie, which premieres on HBO Tuesday, is largely focused on a Moscow-based group of activists attempting to help these survivors flee the country. Among those aided by the network is 21-year-old "Anya," the daughter of a high-ranking Chechen official. For Welcome to Chechnya, he set up a secret editing suite and remained entirely offline while on the job. 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. And hes drawing some hope from the ongoing protests against racism taking place across the United States and around the world. All of the above. Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday! 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. Many who survived imprisonment have fled to Moscow, where they live in a safe house while seeking political asylum in other countries. And the world lets them get away with iteven despite documentaries like this. Anya and her car of dress-shoppers got through. Welcome to Chechnya chronicles the persecution of LGBTQ youth in this ultra-conservative society. 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). 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. Its footage that was shot as trophies by the people who committed those crimes. It said that people in the caf saw the camera and had become nervous about it, that I should hide it better, Ivanova recounts. Welcome to Chechnya is a terrifying documentary about the gay purges happening in Chechnya, Russia. Im still in contact with all those people. The moment is extremely tense. 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. 212 following. On the other end of the line is Anya, a young lesbian whose father is a big muckity-muck in the Chechen government. France even had a decoy phone with proof: downloaded soccer-fan photos and videos, stats about the Egyptian team, vistas with his tour guides. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020 and was released on June 30, 2020, by HBO Films. All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. Finding the right word to describe Welcome to Chechnya isnt easy. 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