The former Newsweek investigative journalist turned filmmaker David France’s third documentary is one of the most harrowing depictions of contemporary LGBTQ life that we will ever have to sit through. Fortunately France and his team are skilled enough to tell the stories with such heartfelt compassion that we don’t just feel like voyeurs but as witnesses to a scenario that should shock us into some sort of action.
Welcome to Chechnya may appear like a documentary thriller but it starts off with a sobering statement “ It happened under Stalin and Hitler. A whole section of the public were identified for extermination without charges or trials. This time it’s not Jews but homosexuals‘ This coming from Olga Baranova the Director of Moscow Community Centre for LGBT+ Initiatives who is one of the leaders of the underground movement to help Chechen’s gays escape with their lives.
Chechnya is a remote southern Republic of the former USSR and is run by a fearless despot Raman Kadyrov who was appointed President by Putin. Whilst Kadyrov outright denies the persecution of gays …….. and even the fact that there are any at all in Chechnya ….. in 2017 it was her who actually started this most pernicious and unwarranted crackdown. Every man (or woman) who was arrested just for being gay was brutally tortured and even electrocuted until they gave the authorities details of at least 10 of their gay friends or contacts. They in turn were then arrested and given the same treatment, which resulted in the Police having the details to a fair proportion of the local LGBTQ community.
The means of torture went way beyond anything the Americans did to prisoners in Iraq, and so many people died in custody and their bodies dumped without trace. The fact that the Authorities in this Muslim State where acting illegally was never questioned by the local ‘straight’ population as if they discovered any of their family members were gay, they were honored bound to kill them
It was as David Isteev, the Crisis Response Coordinator of The Russian LGBT Network something that ‘only could be washed away by blood’.
Despite the personal risks, Isteev and his colleagues plotted and planned rescuing as many gay men and women trapped in Chechnya that they could. It took a great deal of guts, an immense amount of money and safe house/apartments throughout Europe. They also ran a Shelter in a Moscow suburb as a halfway house for those hoping to get travel permits to Canada or Europe.
In the film’s final credits we learn that in the first two years of the Chechnya purge, the underground network resettled 151 people. 55 were accepted by Canada. The US have accepted NONE.
France focuses on the story of “Grisha” a Russian man who was visiting Chechnya and also got caught up in the round-up and was very badly tortured. However as he was not a local, the Police made the mistake of letting him go, which in the end they would regret. Once the realized that he was free to tell his story, they came to Moscow to hunt him down, and unable to find him, threatened his entire family. So now with the Grisha tucked away temporarily in the Shelter and re-united with his boyfriend of 10 years, the Rescue Coordinators found a safe house for his entire family.
They were all then whisked away to an unnamed European country and a new life, but were still warned that they would never be 100% safe as the long arm of Kadyrov’s men could still discover them even there.
Not only did everyone being rescued and passing through Moscow adopt a fake name for security’s sake, but France also used a brand new technology that digitized all the faces beyond recognition. It was only when ‘Grisha’ made the remarkably brave decision to appear before a Russian Panel on Torture back in Moscow and also sue the Government. did we see his real face and discover his name was Maxim Lapunov.
Lapunov is the first and only gay man to come forward publicly about being tortured during the Purge. The Panel was ‘sympathetic’ but the Court refused to hear the Case. Its fair to say that we were panicking as much as his family that his bravery would end up with him losing his life.
Now he is taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights which may prove powerless to get Chechnya to change its ways , but at the very least it has brought the matter into the public arena so other countries can make their own choices on how to deal with such a brutal regime.
By the end of the film Olga Baranova one of the Moscow based rescuers was also in danger and needed to be rescued herself. How she and David Isteev risked so much personally to help save the lives of total strangers reminds us at least of how much good there still is in the world.
France’s first two movies looked back at crucial points in queer history. First his Oscar nominated How To Survive a Plague : the seminal movie on the AIDS Epidemic More recently with the The Death & Life of Marsha P Johnson the transgender drag queen civil rights activist. How with his finely tuned powers of observation, this latest film will be remembered as recording history in the making.
It is an excellent piece of filmmaking and most importantly no matter how painful this devastating story may be, it should be compulsory viewing for the LGBT community and beyond resulting in more people acting to safe more lives.
PS. You may like to check out two interviews we have with David France in the psst.
https:// queerguru.com/david-france-talks-about-how-to-survive-a-plague/
https:// queerguru.com/david-france-victoria-cruz-talk-about-the-death-life-of-marsha-p-johnson/
