
HOLLYWOOD – In an era when documentaries often seem geared more toward a slick and buzzy âdocu-tainmentâ style than to the unfiltered presentation of real-world facts and experiences, âWelcome to Chechnyaâ blasts you in the face like a gust of icy wind.
A harrowing look at the âunderground railroadâ that sprung up within Russia to help the victims of the notorious âgay genocideâ being perpetrated under Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, itâs a film that makes you want to look away but doesnât let you do it. It conveys the unthinkable trauma of living in a constant state of terror while making a desperate, clandestine run for your very life; more than that, it permits us to put a human face â albeit a digitally altered one â on the crisis.
Part of the filmâs impact undoubtedly stems from its subject matter, but itâs at least equally due to the artistry of its director, David France. Itâs not the first time heâs been behind a heavyweight LGBTQ documentary. The longtime journalist made his directing debut with âHow to Survive a Plagueâ in 2012, documenting the early years of the AIDS epidemic with an activistâs passion in a film that won him a host of awards and nominations for a several more, including an Oscar.
Now, âChechnya,â which premiered at last yearâs Sundance Festival and was released by HBO last summer, has made the shortlist for this yearâs Academy Awards, raising the possibility for a second chance at taking home the coveted statue. Yet Oscar gold was not what France had on his mind when had a conversation with the Blade about the film earlier this week. Rather, he wanted to discuss the people itâs about.
France, like everyone else, had been appalled by the tales coming out of Chechnya in 2017. âWe all read the stories,â he tells us now, âbut it wasnât until I read Masha Gessenâs New Yorker piece about the work that ordinary Russians were having to take upon themselves that I became really fascinated.â
He is referring to the network of LGBTQ activists that mobilized in the absence of outside help to extract refugees in daring escapes, hide them in safe houses across Russia, and work with groups around the world to get them out of the country. In âWelcome to Chechnya,â he follows a handful of these accidental heroes, as well as several of the survivors they protect, as they orchestrate and enact spycraft that would be right at home in an episode of âThe Americans.â In the process, he shines a light on more than just the atrocities being committed against queer people in Chechnya. He also illuminates a level of courage that most of us have never had to muster up.
âThatâs what drew me in,â France says. âThe fact that ordinary citizens took it upon themselves to intervene, to try and save lives, while the rest of the world was doing so little about it.â

âItâs not like they had been already doing this work,â he explains. âOlga [Baranova, one of the activists who appears in the film] was running a community center that had an annual arts fair â thatâs the extent of her training for the kind of cape-wearing heroics that you see her carrying out.â
With his cameraman and producer Askold Kurov, France spent months in the underground, chronicling the efforts of the activists and the stories of the survivors under their care, and getting plenty of first-hand experience with the kind of fear under which they had to willingly chosen to live, day after day.
After all, getting out of Chechnya wasnât enough to make anyone safe; Chechen authorities were willing to stop at nothing to make sure nobody had a chance to expose what was going on, up to and including tracking down, recapturing, and maybe even killing any potential witnesses â and anyone who stood in the way was putting themselves in peril, too.
âI remember going on one of the extractions,â he relates. âWe were getting ready to make a run with a couple whose location had been found out. We had only a few hours to get them to the airport, and then we got word of a rumor that a group of assassins had been dispatched to prevent them from leaving the country. We had one bodyguard, with one sidearm, with us.
âThat kind of unbelievable peril is what hung over, and what still hangs over, every aspect of the work these ordinary Russian activists have taken on for themselves.â
Itâs also what made it a challenge to film the refugees, for whom anonymity was a matter of life or death.

âI wanted to show what they looked like,â he tells us. âThe pain that they wore on their faces, the hope â and certainly the fear. And most of them wanted the world to know what had happened to them, to expose these crimes â but they also understood what it would mean for them and their families if they stood up publicly and revealed their truths. They were terrified, and here I was asking them to let me film them anyway and then figure out how to solve this problem later.â
There is still a touch of awe in his voice as he says, âRemarkably, a couple of dozen people agreed to let me do that.â
He continues, âThere were people, of course, who couldnât take that leap with me. There was one person who was nervous even about me filming other people in the shelter. These were people who had just escaped the most horrific abuse and torture, and violation from their own families. They were hiding from their brothers and their uncles, from their own fathers. That dislocation of familial love was so traumatic to everybody there that some of them were just on a very sharp edge â unable to reckon with the past, unable to find security in the present or see hope in the future. You see that in the film with one of them, who even attempts suicide. For those people, it was a difficult arrangement to have me shooting even on the other side of the shelter house. I understood that and I tried to be very respectful.â
The challenge of maintaining privacy would eventually be surmounted by new, state-of-the-art identity protection software, a high-tech touch that France â savvy storyteller that he is â was able to parlay into one of the filmâs most dramatic and unexpected moments. A considerable amount of screen time in âWelcome to Chechnyaâ is devoted to an anonymous refugee who has escaped from his tormentors into the network, where he is reunited with his family and his boyfriend of ten years; a turning point comes when, despite being poised for removal to another country, he chooses to go public with his story and make an official complaint to the Russian government.
As he makes that decision, the false features realistically rendered over his real ones melt away before our eyes, revealing his unaltered face â and with it, his true identity. Itâs a powerful effect, and itâs our official introduction to Maxim Lapunov, whose subsequent appearance before a Russian court to tell his story is captured in the movie. Unsurprisingly, his claims are dismissed, and the need to get him and his loved ones out of the country becomes even more imperative.

In talking about Lapunov, the awe returns to Franceâs voice. âMaximâs moral courage is unmatched. It was really clear that his life was going to be fucked up for the foreseeable future, no matter what he did. The courage that he showed was the courage to throw his body in the way to make sure that other people donât get treated the way that he was treated â to save peopleâs lives. He could have gone anywhere in the world, and just nursed his post-traumatic memories in safety, but instead he went back into the fire.
That was remarkable. I watched him make those decisions, I watched him take on that risk, I watched him bring his family along on that journey and win their allegiance in these choices â these are human dramas like you see in Hollywood films that actually are taking place in the queer battle against the crimes in Russia.â
He segues into a similar expression of respect for David Isteev, another activist prominently featured in âChechnya.â
âWhen you look at his face, you just get this incredible sense of high alert and of moral purpose. It makes me think of the stories we have heard from the Holocaust, of citizens who would otherwise have been untouched who reach into some deep reserve to do something. Thatâs him. And being in the presence of that was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.â
If it sounds like he has bonded with his subjects, itâs because he has. Being embedded in the shelter network for such an extended period of time, he and Kurov became part of the underground themselves. âWe were no longer visitors from outside,â he says. âWe were experiencing what they were. I spent nights full of terror inside those safe houses, when rumors were flying about people who might have been seen, locations that might have been revealed, dangers that might have been heightened â I felt that with them. We huddled together, and, in a way, I became part of their journey.
âI do feel personally attached to those people having been through that with them. Itâs something like the bond of warfare that you read about. I would do anything for David. I would do anything for Maxim and his family.â
The real emotion apparent in these professions of kinship is surely one of the reasons why the documentarian is still, more than six months after his filmâs debut, eager to talk about it. The people with whom he developed these strong bonds are still very much at risk.

The biggest horrors in âWelcome to Chechnyaâ are only glimpsed briefly in dark and blurry videos intercepted from the web by the network, or described in the stories of torment, humiliation and brutality told by the survivors, but they cast a dark enough shadow over the imagination to make us want to believe they are safely in the past.
Unfortunately, as France is quick to remind us, LGBTQ persecution in Chechnya is still very much âan ongoing humanitarian crisis.â Just last week, two refugees were kidnapped from the network by Russian authorities and returned to Chechnya, an incident that brought the situation there back into the headlines.
âThese were two very young men, one of them twenty, and the other seventeen â not even a man,â relates France. âThey had been abducted last summer in Chechnya and tortured, they barely got out alive. They were rescued and extracted by the network and were being held in a safe house while the work was being done with foreign partners to try and get them out. Now they are back in detention in Chechnya. Itâs a very volatile situation.â
Yet itâs also a situation in which, perhaps ironically, he sees a hope that has been scarce for the past four years.
âThe United States, in this new administration, has expressed great concern for those two kids and demanded information on their safety,â he points out. âThe European Court for Human Rights has demanded access to them, and safe passage for them to get back to the safe house where they were being held.â
For him, itâs a call to action. âThe Russian LGBT network is on the ground, still fighting this fight,â he says. âWe can urgently throw our voices behind their efforts with regard to these two youngsters â we could save their lives. There are petitions, but thatâs not enough. We know from watching these activistsâ work that itâs essential, itâs extensive, and as you can imagine, itâs costly. They cannot raise money within Russia, so theyâve asked people who see the film to help them by donating.
Thereâs a donation page on the movie site. Weâve just watched almost $200,000 move through there, in the six months since the film came out, and that money goes to the Moscow Community Center, Olgaâs group that runs the shelter system, to the Russian LGBT Network that does the extractions and runs the global hotline for the crisis â and it also goes to Maxim and his legal case, which is still percolating through, and showing great progress in, the European courts.
âSo, I think thereâs hope, but we have to act urgently. I think whatâs shocked us all, in the last few years, is how easily we can lose ground. All this progress that weâve made over the last thirty or forty years can be reversed in a heartbeat, and thatâs whatâs happened in Russia, and Russia has led the way in this dramatic reversal of queer progress, all across Europe. Itâs going to take a lot of people coming together internationally to stop that, but it is possible.â
Heâs a realist in his expectations, though. âWe canât hope for is regime change in Chechnya or in Russia. Those are not practical, immediate goals. But we can force Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya to stop this. He is a puppet of Putinâs. If we make it politically untenable for Putin not to intervene there, then he will lift up the telephone and say to Kadyrov, âStop it.â Thatâs all that it takes. Itâs that simple. We havenât gotten there because we havenât had the kind of global leadership that can bring collective pressure on Putin to do that. I think weâre in a place where we can now.
âEven just watching the film is an important step. The Russian government has said repeatedly that this is not happening, that thereâs no evidence, even â ridiculously â that there are no queer Chechens. They say that no one has come forward, but Maxim did that, officially, and they rejected his claims. The people protected by the digital technology we deployed in the film have also spelled out their stories, so they are witnesses. And weâre all witnesses, now.â
The passion creeps back into Franceâs voice as he recalls, âThat was my promise to the people in the network, when I said I wanted to film with them, that I was going to help make this so that everybody in the world knows whatâs happening.
âAnybody who sees the film becomes a witness, and it becomes an act of resistance just to talk about what you see in it.â
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