There's no time for sweeping shots of foreign. And then theres the evidence we see for ourselves: cell phone footage of people being beaten and harassed. (We hear their real voices almost the entire film is subtitled. [11], The film received universal critical acclaim, holding an approval rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 72 reviews, with an average rating of 8.7/10. Thank you! 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.. The face of a volunteer, Miguel Grisanti, is used to cloak the real subject in Welcome to Chechnya.. 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. 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. In another, a woman is attacked by a relative who it's implied but not shown proceeds to bludgeon her to death. 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. I was so involved in the technical work for the months leading up to Sundance that I hadnt stepped back to see the film. 4,370 Followers, 212 Following, 197 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Welcome To Chechnya (@welcometochechnya) welcometochechnya. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. The fate of his call for investigation would be depressingly familiar. 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. They were sent over WhatsApp groups up the chain of command, so that Ramzan Kadyrov would know that his orders are being carried out., And when you saw the footage, I realized that I wanted to take that away from them, and turn their trophies into evidence, he continued. Filmmaker David France goes inside what can only be called a genocide that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has unleashed against his LGBTQ citizens. Nichols said he was won over by Frances film. To have the savvy to negotiate a political media landscape where a video could potentially be a deepfake, or a legitimate video could be called a deepfake, I think those are cases people need to be aware of, he said. The unrelated subjects were mostly queer activists in New York who I found on Instagram and elsewhere, France said. For most of the 100 minutes that followed, Isteev seemed to be in much the same position, trying to juggle the fates of those who had ended up under his protection as he attempted to spirit them to safety. Its footage that was shot as trophies by the people who committed those crimes. Enter activists David Isteev and Olga Baranova of Chechnyas covert LGBTQ+ network, a modern-day Underground Railroad smuggling the regimes would-be victims to secret safe houses where they can await visas and asylum from sympathetic countries. ET on HBO. Blurring out a mob informant? Welcome to Chechnya chronicles the persecution of LGBTQ youth in this ultra-conservative society. After six months of quarantine in a safe house awaiting a visa, she lost hope and left. According to Representative Billy Long, abortions, not guns, are the problem. Another agonising airport moment came when Grisha flew to lasting safety abroad, accompanied not only by his boyfriend but by his family as well: the threats of the Chechen power structures extended so far in Russia that all concerned were in peril, and so had to be moved. 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 . To remain inconspicuous, only amateur camera gear was used on the film. Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of the autonomous region of Russia, enacted a campaign in 2017 to find, imprison, torture and sometimes kill LGBTQ Chechens. I want them to feel responsible for doing something to help stop it., Donate to the newsroom now. Those are the stories that have really fascinated me the way that their activists handle these challenges and the specter of death. So last century. What was a very expensive proposition has become even more expensive. This melding of techniques resulted in an illusion that received high marks from a Dartmouth study group researching the so-called uncanny valley, a metric of empathy for nonhuman faces. Welcome to Chechnya (HBO): An inside look at a group of activists risking their lives to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ campaign in the Russian republic of Chechnya. This documentary, which airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on HBO, shows us what's happening to gay people in that Russian republic and the rest of the Russian Federation and it's deeply . Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. This happened shortly after Frontal journalists published their investigation Forced Adoption: The Missing Children of Kherson on the social network. ), Everybody understood the importance of telling the story. [2], Further complicating the production of the film was the need to protect the identities of interviewees. Did the Utah Legislature do enough to save the Great Salt Lake? 'Welcome to Chechnya' Review: A look at state-sanctioned torture, rape and murder of homosexuals in Russia. Jimmy Kimmel Roasts Fragile Snowflake Donald Trump for Allegedly Trying to Censor Him, Ghostwriting Gloria Swanson: The Strange, Sexually Charged Genesis of a Legendary Autobiography, Ezra Millers Messiah Delusions: Inside. After the initial gains of the Russian army, the Chechen rebels demonstrated a . To make matters worse, the GoPro screen would power off after one minute. Storyville: Welcome to Chechnya, BBC Four review - trauma, tension and resistance |, Dispatches: Hunted - Gay and Afraid, Channel 4, Fleishman Is in Trouble, Disney+ review - a compelling drama about mid-life crises in Manhattan, Drive to Survive, Season 5, Netflix review - fly-on-the wall F1 show may need a reboot, The Gold, BBC One review - gripping dramatisation of the 1983 Brink's-Mat bullion robbery, Fauda, Season 4, Netflix review - Israeli terrorism thriller gets darker and dirtier, Women at War, Netflix review - contrasting stories entwine during the chaos of World War One, Stewart, Sky Documentaries review - touching and insightful portrait of Scottish race ace, Happy Valley, Series 3, BBC One review - tension mounts as the Yorkshire crime drama approaches its conclusion, Stonehouse, ITV review - history repeats itself as farce, Doc Martin Christmas Special, ITV review - Santa comes to Portwenn as the final curtain falls, Blu-ray: Ghost Stories for Christmas, Volume 1. 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. Its not a story about me, France says simply. I love her. And that included extreme security protocols while filming in Chechnya encrypting the footage and smuggling it out of the country. With no help from the Kremlin and only faint global condemnation, activists take matters into their own hands. Chechen forces successfully raided Russian-held Grozny for weapons in March. [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. 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. Some strange people came to my flat and spoke with my mom. Theres a clip, in David Frances Welcome to Chechnya, of a 2017 interview with Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. Its got a beautiful lens on it, says the director, but it looks like a toy. '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. 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. But still these elegantly edited cinematic set-pieces are interrupted by blunt visions of horror trophy videos captured on Chechen citizens cell phones of savage beatings, gang rapes and even a stoning. 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. Thats where he was seized by the security agents. Panetta recalled talking with her mother, who had sent her bad information about Covid-19. These scenes dont tell us nearly as much as the scenes in which we hear people speak about their experiences firsthandas one young man does, detailing his torture to his boyfriend, with whom he is joyfully able to reunite. Im still in contact with all those people. All Rights Reserved. Without that outrage, it will keep going. And also to support Maxim Lapunov and his family in their lawsuit. And they purchased one small LED panela Yongnuo YN-160 IIIfor shooting inside dark rooms or cars at night. But as the movie tells us upfront, France took an extraordinary step to protect their identities further, using sophisticated facial-disguise technology. People felt for them in a very emotional way, and showed it, France said. When he was captured on the streets of Grozny, he had been selling balloon art. Here security guards inspect passports and sharply confer about one. So I was following the footsteps of my heroes. His companions were two guides hed hired. Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story. A lavalier mic (considered professional gear, thus suspect) was used when safely inside the shelter. 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. 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. Even Facebook, not known for its strict policing of content, pledged to ban deepfakes in January. Another of these young people tries to slit their wrists. At the airport, photography is not allowed, though authorities tolerate selfies. When we learned of that footage, it was shocking, France said. Quite popular in Russia, GoPro is a camera everybody can have, with no questions asked, Ivanova says. He also long covered the AIDS crisis, about which he wrote the award-winning book How to Survive a Plague, adapted from his Oscar-nominated 2012 documentary of the same title (which also debuted at Sundance). 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. Instead, we see David and a team of associates covertly enter Grozny with a carefully crafted plan to extract desperate subjects - in this case, "Anya", the twenty-one year old daughter of a local government official who is being blackmailed by her uncle, threatening to expose her sexuality if she doesn't allow him to rape her. 10 Chechen gays get tortured and the whole world cares. But politicians have become targets, too. Many who survived imprisonment have fled to Moscow, where they live in a safe house while seeking political asylum in other countries. They were horrible stories and theres no doubt that they were real, France, an Oscar-nominated activist filmmaker, said. He had been in Chechnya for work when he was caught and tortured by the police, his difference in circumstances principally the fact of his being an ethnic Russian meant that he was released finally giving him the courage to go public about what had happened and demand that the authorities investigate. When he went to visit a guy he met online, policemen hiding in the bathroom arrested and detained him. 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. We witnessed Anyas extrication from Chechnya across the mountains, the first step in an evacuation that saw her moved to temporary safety in the hinterland of a neighbouring country (her journey would go no further, not the only example where family coercion or other intervention would prove more powerful than fear). Post author: Post published: May 11, 2022 Post category: orchard lake united hockey Post comments: famous asian psychologists famous asian psychologists Patricia Thomson is a longtime film journalist and contributing writer for American Cinematographer. Distressing. What made the time right for the documentary to be released now? 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. . 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. They talk about their injuries and show us bruises that havent yet healed. Welcome to Chechnya airs June 30 at 7 p.m. Then its over, and Anya is free to go. (France did insist, however, on 4K for cinematic lift.). I tried to install the app, and it didnt work. That meant Ivanova was sneaking peeks or shooting blind throughout the operation. It allows us to feel that whammy of: This guy was beaten up and tortured and electrocuted and I am seeing him him being his face bare his soul.. T he anti-gay purge in Chechnya began in 2017. [9][10], It was shown at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2020. 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. From the start, a disclaimer states that certain subjects have been digitally disguised for their safety. It was my greatest fear: that I could blow up the whole operation. 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. Saudi jihadist Ibn al-Khattab staged a devastating ambush of a Russian convoy at Shatoy on April 16 that prompted the . We have group therapy sessions about it to process the work that we had gone through.. Now Streaming. The film follows the work of activists rescuing survivors of torture in Chechnya. Chechnya's been especially . Agents warned Ivanova she couldnt film. 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. Everyone in Russia is buried in their phones, says France, so Kurov following suit wouldnt raise any suspicions. France is an award-winning journalist who has been a war correspondent in Central America. His film reveals the ongoing danger to LGBTQ Chechens targeted for persecution and death in a campaign to 'cleanse' the republic. 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. Si su padre, miembro del gobierno checheno . Ghastly. Like most of the victims in Welcome to Chechnya, Grishas identity is hidden with deep fake technology. The main camera, operated by Kurov, was a Sony FDR-AX100 handycam. Republican Congressman Blames Mass Shootings on Women Having Rights. So when I met him, he was an open, generous figure who allowed me to share his journey with him in the most profound way., In order to hide the identities of the residents in the safe house, France used technology to replace their faces with those of 22 LGBTQ activists in New York City. 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. These people are not professional movers: they are former journalists and photographers, artists, academicsnone of whom had experience with helping people covertly escape oppressive regimes, until they did. They are heartbreaking. Anya's story is one of the main threads. 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. For securitys sake, Ivanova needed to use a burner phone rather than her own. Whats not obvious in the filmthough not on purposeis that this shot was taken from the backup teams taxi, not Anyas. David Frances Welcome to Chechnya ( @ welcometochechnya ) welcometochechnya author and documentarian David France goes what. Gone through.. now Streaming the director, but it looks like a toy and! 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