'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. Chechnya, also spelled Chechnia or Chechenia, republic in southwestern Russia, situated on the northern flank of the Greater Caucasus range. David Frances HBO documentary about Chechnyas anti-LGBT pogrom is brutal, but necessary. 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. Welcome to Chechnya airs June 30 at 7 p.m. 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. Heinous. They have . Nor did the editing and VFX suites in New York. Another of these young people tries to slit their wrists. They were keepsakes from these horrible events, and they were also deliverables. 50% of the Chechen population killed in 1944 and 200 000 Chechens killed (1/5 of the population) during the Chechen wars and hundreds of Chechens being assinated and going missing each year and no one gives a rats ass about Chechnya. Filmmaker David France goes inside what can only be called a genocide that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has unleashed against his LGBTQ citizens. hide caption. A film about persecuted gay and lesbian Chechens uses digital manipulation to guard their identities without losing their humanity. Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday! With little emotion, the young man explains his scars as his boyfriend touches those spots and says nothing. France doesnt see it as opening a new can of worms so much as the same old one. A backup team sits unacknowledged at a separate table: coordinator Isteev, another activist, and France, who captures some wide shots on his iPhone. 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. We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. Welcome To Chechnya. (Photo courtesy of Igor Myakotin/Welcome to Chechnya) Maxim Lapunov at the Sundance Film Festival. France is an award-winning journalist who has been a war correspondent in Central America. "Welcome to Chechnya" es un urgente documental que destaca a valientes activistas rescatando a personas gay del exterminio en Chechenia. I want people to be invested in it. Anyone can read what you share. Summary: Searing urgency is a guiding force as Welcome to Chechnya shadows a group of activists who risk unimaginable peril to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ+ pogrom raging in the repressive and closed Russian republic. 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. Welcome to Chechnya: Directed by David France. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020 and was released on June 30, 2020, by HBO Films. 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. Anya decides to escape, but that isn't so easy with the authorities soon hot on her trail. They were horrible stories and theres no doubt that they were real, France, an Oscar-nominated activist filmmaker, said. And that included extreme security protocols while filming in Chechnya encrypting the footage and smuggling it out of the country. Horrific. Its not a story about me, France says simply. The other is the story of "Grisha", a 30-year-old man who went to work in Chechnya only to be arrested, tortured and forced to give up details of other. 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. But I knew I wanted to tell a much more in-depth story about what something as hideous as this meant to the people who survived it.. The activists intercepted numerous videos, captured on cell phones, of people being tortured, attacked on the street and even raped. Playing the aunties are cameraperson Alexandra Ivanova and a female activist. The next nail-biter is at the airports Passport Checkpoint. On the other end of the line is Anya, a young lesbian whose father is a big muckity-muck in the Chechen government. 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. The camerawork is rough and ragged; the sense of menace is palpable. 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. Anya arrives and Ivanova films the meetup surreptitiously on a GoPro. 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. I think the point's been made and now it's time to take . 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. welcome to chechnya what happened to anya. I come from a news background, so I love the idea of making something that really could have happened, said Francesca Panetta, co-director of the video. Their storylines are framed by the narrative . Reflecting on his participation in Anyas rescue, France says, I dont think Ive experienced anything as harrowing as that in my life. Even Facebook, not known for its strict policing of content, pledged to ban deepfakes in January. Every step of the way, things were air-gapped to defend against hacks. Thats where he was seized by the security agents. Shes just fearless, says France. This is nonsense, he says. One young man is fleeing because while he is not a citizen of Chechnya, he has spent time detained in one of its prisons for being gayand upon his release back to Russia, he became a threat to a regime that would rather the world buy into its denialism. Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter for The Kyiv Independent, tweeted: "Magomed Tushayev, one of . . Blurring out a mob informant? The mere presence of. At the airport, photography is not allowed, though authorities tolerate selfies. After ineffective attempts at funding Chechen opposition groups, a Russian invasion began on December 11, 1994. 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. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax Since the films Sundance premiere Ive seen a few folks take exception to the slickness with which France and editor Tyler H. Walk have given Welcome to Chechnya the lean sizzle of a white-knuckle suspense picture, and I must confess Ive wrestled with whether or not Im trivializing serious subject matter when I tell people I spent most of the movie on the edge of my seat. Si su padre, miembro del gobierno checheno . I was thankful we were able to capture that., For her part, Ivanova received some visitors after several expeditions for the film. 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. His bigoted policies and authoritarian behavior make him just as bad a pick for the top job in Washington. Welcome to Chechnya opened with footage of activist David Isteev (pictured below) waiting anxiously on his phone, listening to 21-year-old Anya the names of all except the activists were changed, their faces and voices disguised from the Chechen capital Grozny, tell how she was being blackmailed by a family member threatening to reveal her sexuality. But there is not, of course, footage of them actually being tortured. Her uncles threatening to out her unless she has sex with him, and given the high-profile family connections Isteev and Baranova have even less time and resources than usual to sneak her out of the country. But France has some hope that Putin can be pressured to rein in Kadyrov and stop him and the others who, under his authority, are carrying out these atrocities. If European countries were united as a single voice on LGBTQ issues, he said, that could happen. Maybe it shouldnt be. 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. From acclaimed journalist and Oscar (R)-nominated director David France (How to Survive a Plague) comes this searing documentary about a group of brave activists risking their lives to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ campaign in the Russian republic of Chechnya--which has led to the torture and disappearance of untold numbers of people. The website's critics consensus reads: "An illuminating and urgent call to action, Welcome to Chechnya portrays the horrors of the mass persecution of the LGBTQ+ community in the Chechen Republic with tenacity and tenderness. 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. I tried to install the app, and it didnt work. That meant Ivanova was sneaking peeks or shooting blind throughout the operation. The Montreal Mafia Murders: Blood, Gore, Cannolis, and Hockey Bags, A Comprehensive Guide to Why a Ron DeSantis Presidency Would Be as Terrifying as a Trump One. From the start, a disclaimer states that certain subjects have been digitally disguised for their safety. Plans start at $9.99/month. In 2017, the Russian republic of Chechnya began what some news outlets have dubbed the gay purge, rounding up and torturing LGBTQ+ citizens at secret black sites. I want them to feel responsible for doing something to help stop it., Donate to the newsroom now. . 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. France included. Read that word, and digest what it means. 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