Directed by David France
Featuring Olga Baranova, David Istee and Maxim Lapunov
Running time: 1 hour and 47

by Ryan Smillie

I remember reading Masha Gessen’s “The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya’s Purge” in The New Yorker almost exactly three years ago. Amid years of increasing anti-gay legislation and hate crimes throughout Russia, the Chechen government had initiated anti-gay purges, targeting the LGBTQ citizens of Chechnya. Gessen detailed the lead-up to this anti-gay campaign, the torture inflicted on its targets, and the efforts of Russian LGBTQ activists to protect gay Chechens. Days after reading Gessen’s article, David France, director of How to Survive a Plague and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, was in Moscow, beginning work on his next documentary, Welcome to Chechnya, which debuts on HBO on June 30th.

Following activists Olga Baranova (also profiled in Gessen’s article), David Isteev and a number of gay Chechen refugees, Welcome to Chechnya continues the harrowing story of Chechnya’s anti-gay purges. With the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives and the Russian LGBT Network respectively, Baranova and Isteev support gay Chechen refugees, getting them out of Chechnya, hiding them in Russia or in other unspecified countries, and even attempting to secure asylum for them. Their work is dangerous but necessary in a country that turns a blind eye to violence against LGBTQ people, and even tacitly condones the purges led by Ramzan Kadyrov, the Head of the Chechen Republic. And as if maintaining a network of underground LGBTQ support in Russia didn’t seem dangerous enough, France shows the activists on a series of missions straight out of a spy movie - sneaking a young lesbian out of Chechnya after her uncle threatens her, attempting to intercept another young woman whose father has caught up with her, and moving the entire family of a gay Russian threatened by his former Chechen captors out of Russia and then getting him back to Moscow so he can go public with the abuse he faced at the hands of the Chechen police.

Using newly developed digital disguising technology (the inverse of the notorious DeepFake A.I.), France is able to replace the refugees’ faces and voices, mostly with those of New York-based activists, protecting their identities while still allowing them to tell their stories in their own words. Though the digital disguising leaves its subjects with a slightly uncanny soft focus, the effect is remarkable, lending the documentary a level of intimacy missing from other documentaries with anonymized subjects. As gut-wrenching as it is to have a reporter or activist describe the abuses and disappearances, it’s even worse and more visceral for a tortured Chechen to detail his experience with electrocution.

Throughout the film, France intersperses violent footage, some of which has been intercepted by LGBTQ activists from the perpetrators of these acts - a savage beating, a rape, a suicide attempt. All of the victims are digitally disguised, and I agree with France that it’s important to know that these are just some of the dangers faced by gay Chechens. But when a verbal explanation of electrocution was enough for me to wince and cover my eyes, I wonder whether the inclusion of this footage was necessary. And maybe it is! I can’t stop thinking about it, and maybe that’s the point.

There are a few fleeting moments when the refugees seem to let their guard down - joking about who they’ll sleep with and how horny the others are, reading up on how to assimilate into Canada, a hopeful asylum destination. What is happening to gay people in Chechnya is obscene, and I hope their futures are full of these moments. I wish we had been able to see more of them, to see these refugees as people and not just as victims. At the end of the film, France includes a link to learn more about the anti-gay purges in Chechnya and to support the people working to stop them. Whether you watch the movie or not (and I would recommend watching!), I’d encourage you to check out the site and see what you can do to help: Save Lives: Welcome to Chechnya     

Welcome to Chechnya debuts on HBO, June 30th