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. It's a bold gambit that may put off those who find it too duplicitous in the context of a documentary. Some thought it was too much of a risk. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. 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. To remain inconspicuous, only amateur camera gear was used on the film. It smiles, it cries in exactly the same way, but it is somebody elses face.. Welcome to Chechnya airs June 30 at 7 p.m. [5], One of the refugees, Maxim Lapunov, is publicly identified in the film, as he sought, and failed, to get legal redress from Russian authorities.[6]. Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing, U.S. The movie opens on a dark street in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya, where a man smokes a cigarette and arranges secret meetings and transports by phone. 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. Where do the new faces actually come from? Few people can publicly attest to this, because anyone who speaks out against Kadyrov becomes an automatic target of the Chechen government. And in fact, the Russian LGBTQ movement was left all alone to try and fashion some sort of response to what was going on there. Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. The piece will go live on July 20 at moondisaster.org. Now Streaming. 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. 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. Among those in the film are David Isteev, who leads the rescue missions through the Russian LGBT Network and Olga Baranova, director of the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives. Its a matter of trusting the process.. Panetta recalled talking with her mother, who had sent her bad information about Covid-19. Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter for The Kyiv Independent, tweeted: "Magomed Tushayev, one of . 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They were horrible stories and theres no doubt that they were real, France, an Oscar-nominated activist filmmaker, said. Im still in contact with all those people. 'Welcome to Chechnya' Review: A look at state-sanctioned torture, rape and murder of homosexuals in Russia. There's no time for sweeping shots of foreign. 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. 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. . Anyone can read what you share. It began with a drug raid when police arrested a young man and found sexually explicit images of men on his phone. Post author: Post published: May 11, 2022 Post category: orchard lake united hockey Post comments: famous asian psychologists famous asian psychologists He wants you to see them. The face of a volunteer, Miguel Grisanti, is used to cloak the real subject in Welcome to Chechnya.. This happened shortly after Frontal journalists published their investigation Forced Adoption: The Missing Children of Kherson on the social network. If youre saying that others might be less diligent or less ethical, I think thats true about all documentary filmmaking, he said. 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. What we did was to borrow from the world of deepfakes and find this social justice use for it, he explained. And it still is. If anything, the activists tell us, the women need more help escaping. Then its over, and Anya is free to go. Did the Utah Legislature do enough to save the Great Salt Lake? This technology allowed us to just stretch the facesover the images that I shot in the film. 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. And in 70 countries across the globe where its still illegal to be gay. Welcome to Chechnya is largely procedural, with long scenes detailing the steps it takes to covertly travel from one territory to another, toward safety or something like it. 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. 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. David France, left, and the face-capture producer Johnny Han watch a volunteer in the studio. When transferring data from a card, for instance, that computer would have its Wi-Fi card removed and Bluetooth disabled. The next nail-biter is at the airports Passport Checkpoint. Disgraceful. All Rights Reserved. Im still processing, and so is the rest of the crew. 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. All rights reserved. And what they had put together was a search and rescue operation, like something that you would imagine in a World War II movie. Si su padre, miembro del gobierno checheno . 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. 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. 'Welcome to Chechnya' Director on Doc's Impact: "It's Engendering a Real Wave of Empathy for LGBTQ Russians" Oscar nominee David France's startling depiction of the courageous effort to save. To avoid exposing their work, it was shot in secret, using hidden cameras, cell phones, GoPros, and handycams. (Photo courtesy of Igor Myakotin/Welcome to Chechnya) Maxim Lapunov at the Sundance Film Festival. 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. Giving them different faces also makes a kind of poetic sense: It's a reminder that to be LGBTQ in a repressive society is to never feel comfortable in your own skin. 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 . People felt for them in a very emotional way, and showed it, France said. Would you like to receive event invitations, funding news, and other updates from the International Documentary Association? 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. 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. At the airport, photography is not allowed, though authorities tolerate selfies. 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's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email. All technology has a dual moral purpose, he argued. And I understood, of course.. And that hasnt changed since the documentary was completed. 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