welcome to chechnya what happened to anya
Im still processing, and so is the rest of the crew. I didnt want to create a reel of horrors, I wanted to underscore what had happened to the people who were in the film, France said. 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. Another of these young people tries to slit their wrists. And while there initially isn't much background on the two fugitive subjects the 30-year-old "Grisha" and the 21-year-old Muslim lesbian "Anya" you quickly understand why. 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. [1] The activists intercepted numerous videos, captured on cell phones, of people being tortured, attacked on the street and even raped. Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of the autonomous. Read that word, and digest what it means. Where photography is strictly forbidden is at passport control. Chechnya, also spelled Chechnia or Chechenia, republic in southwestern Russia, situated on the northern flank of the Greater Caucasus range. 'Welcome to Chechnya' Review: A look at state-sanctioned torture, rape and murder of homosexuals in Russia. And then theres the evidence we see for ourselves: cell phone footage of people being beaten and harassed. The film premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival,[8] and screened at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Everyones nervous, knowing that at any minute Anyas name could appear on a federal wanted list. Although some didnt. When the documentarian David France decided to chronicle the anti-gay and lesbian purges that had unleashed a wave of fear and violence in Chechnya, he needed more than just a camera. Luckily, they had enough faith in me. Nor did the editing and VFX suites in New York. HBO. So theres a lot of work to be done.. [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. Now, it must bring him down Jonathan Littell Putin believed he could invade Ukraine because everything we failed to do over the last 22 years taught him. Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story. [4] To protect the identities of the interviewees, they could not move the footage across the internet nor work on it in an open studio setting. What was a very expensive proposition has become even more expensive. 10 Chechen gays get tortured and the whole world cares. I wanted you to feel what he felt at that moment, France said. But also, theyre inspiring stories, I think., (How to Survive a Plague is streaming on Amazon Prime; The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson is streaming on Netflix.). 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. (Photo courtesy of Igor Myakotin/Welcome to Chechnya) David France at the Sundance Film Festival. Shooting Scenarios is a new column that takes a single scene and breaks it down cinematographically, looking at shooting logistics, creative challenges, and camera gear deployed. 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. It was a gay purge. Fortunately, the brave Grisha has the support of his immediate family, who decide to move with him; as his mother notes in one poignant scene, her loyalty is to her family not to an oppressive government. France doesnt see it as opening a new can of worms so much as the same old one. I appeared to be smiling at my own image while actually grabbing shots over his shoulder. With no help from the Kremlin and only faint global condemnation, activists take matters into their own hands. 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. A film about persecuted gay and lesbian Chechens uses digital manipulation to guard their identities without losing their humanity. We werent just erasing cards; we were overwriting them to make the data irretrievable. Once the encrypted hard drive arrived in New York, theyd send word back to Russia to overwrite the two remaining drives. 4,370 Followers, 212 Following, 197 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Welcome To Chechnya (@welcometochechnya) welcometochechnya. Their visual information was married on a deep-learning level with the Chechen footage. and Anya, a young queer woman from Grozny, who wants to flee her powerful Chechen family. Welcome to Chechnya chronicles the persecution of LGBTQ youth in this ultra-conservative society. But things got much worse in early 2017, when the leader of the republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, a strongman with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, began a violent purge of anyone suspected of being gay or transgender. Hearing the victims recount their stories is devastating. The operation begins in a fast-food restaurant. Verified. People felt for them in a very emotional way, and showed it, France said. Playing the aunties are cameraperson Alexandra Ivanova and a female activist. The found footage of attacks on members of the Chechen LGBTQ community illustrates the level of terror victims experienced and what might happen to them if they got caught. . Like most of the victims in Welcome to Chechnya, Grishas identity is hidden with deep fake technology. We dont have such people here. 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. . I want them to feel responsible for doing something to help stop it., Donate to the newsroom now. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. And it still is. 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. 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. Welcome To Chechnya. Whats not obvious in the filmthough not on purposeis that this shot was taken from the backup teams taxi, not Anyas. Im still in contact with all those people. Members of the LGBTQ+ community are being systematically hunted, detained, tortured, and executed by Chechen authorities, civilians, and their own family members. A gay couple in Welcome to Chechnya. The faces were replaced in postproduction. Welcome to Chechnya is a blisteringly painful watch, one that imparts new meaning on the practice of bearing witness. 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. 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. People there are killed and tortured for being gay, as described in scary detail within the film. 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. Welcome to Chechnya is a grimly ironic title for a documentary that plays like a chilling undercover thriller. The mysterious disappearance of gay Chechen singer Zelim Bakaev after a visit to Grozny for his sister's wedding in August 2017[7] also receives a brief mention in the film. "Welcome to Chechnya" is a vital and urgent portrait of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and the world needs to hear about it. Si su padre, miembro del gobierno checheno . It was by far the most emotional journey Ive ever been on, said France in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune. Moved by the plight of queer people trying to escape government-sanctioned persecution of the Russian state's LGBTQ community, he embedded himself in the rescue efforts to smuggle out refugees to safer corners of the . I asked them if they would lend their faces as a human shield to protect the identities of the folks Id filmed. What we did was to borrow from the world of deepfakes and find this social justice use for it, he explained. Oscar-nominated filmmaker David France follows the activists who expose Russia's war on gays. Like all great political documentaries, Welcome to Chechnya is a call to action. Say hello to deepfake. 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. (All refugees are assigned pseudonyms, such as Grisha and Anya.) Anya's story is one of the main threads. Anya arrives and Ivanova films the meetup surreptitiously on a GoPro. You can just put something like a book on top of the GoPro and it becomes invisible. She adds, You can always tell them you didnt understand.. Its not legal to encrypt in Russia, so we were taking a risk, France notes. When he made his first documentary, 2012's How to Survive a Plague, about the early AIDS activists in America, the director didn't hesitate to describe his protagonists there as heroes, for the way that they stood up for what they believed in, against adversity: it's an accolade that seems no less appropriate here. He did say they have been concerned about safety at screenings, and that they took special safety precautions at Sundance to protect the people who appear in the film from any undue danger.. I think the point's been made and now it's time to take . And this changes nothing. 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.. It was released on June 30, 2020 by HBO Films. What our film proves is that this can be done in the right way., Deepfake Technology Enters the Documentary World, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/movies/deepfakes-documentary-welcome-to-chechnya.html. We beat this thing up a bit, put tape on it, disabled all the red lights, and made it look like it belongs to somebodys child. Or a tourist. Movie. War brought Vladimir Putin to power in 1999. Nichols said he was won over by Frances film. This is the kind of film destined to be on "essential" documentary lists for decades to come, the kind we will look back on as critical documentation of a historic wrongdoing. The piece will go live on July 20 at moondisaster.org. Thanks to a toxic brew of nationalistic fervor, Putins gay propaganda law and some good old-fashioned religious fundamentalism, homosexuals have been scapegoated as disgraces only blood can cleanse, in many cases becoming victims of honor-killings by their own families. Welcome to Chechnya airs on HBO Tuesday, June 30, at 10 p.m. Sean Burns Twitter Film CriticSean Burns is a film critic for The ARTery. Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday! 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. Bogdan Left, Grisha Right in "Welcome to Chechnya". In the Russian republic of Chechnya, the gay community has been hunted. But a problem surfaced the night before the rescue. Theres a clip, in David Frances Welcome to Chechnya, of a 2017 interview with Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov. And everybody understood that their own testimony was essential to bringing this atrocity back into the public domain. "[12] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 86 out of 100 based on 17 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[13]. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. David Frances revelatory film may have been subtitled The Gay Purge, but from the start it was clear this wasnt just another documentary from Russia charting the increasing pressure faced by that countrys queer community. Many who survived imprisonment have fled to Moscow, where they live in a safe house while seeking political asylum in other countries. According to Representative Billy Long, abortions, not guns, are the problem. What I learned from that story in The New Yorker was that the crimes that had been exposed earlier in the year hadnt stopped, that nothing about the exposure in the world media, nothing about the expressions of outrage from European leaders, nothing about the meek, near silence from the Trump administration had done anything to slow the campaign that was being carried out by the leadership in Chechnya against the LGBTQ community, France tells Variety. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of the autonomous region of Russia, enacted a campaign in 2017 to find, imprison, torture and sometimes kill LGBTQ Chechens. [2], Further complicating the production of the film was the need to protect the identities of interviewees. Here security guards inspect passports and sharply confer about one. 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. A group of activists risk their lives fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in Chechnya. It smiles, it cries in exactly the same way, but it is somebody elses face.. A FILM BY DAVID FRANCE. Deepfake Technology Enters the Documentary World. Anya, the daughter of a high-ranking official in the Chechen government and extensive resources to track her down, is deposited into an apartment at an undisclosed location in Eurasia. 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. The step . The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Posted on 21 de fevereiro de 2022 by . Heinous. And also to support Maxim Lapunov and his family in their lawsuit. Harrowing and brutal, Welcome to Chechnya, France's third film, is all the more prescient right now. 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. 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. France didnt want to talk about any threats he or other members of the production team might have received. I was so involved in the technical work for the months leading up to Sundance that I hadnt stepped back to see the film. With little emotion, the young man explains his scars as his boyfriend touches those spots and says nothing. His method essentially involved filming unrelated subjects in a studio with a nine-camera array capturing their faces from all angles. 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. Appalling. The moment is extremely tense. She would say, But it was texted to me by my friend. And the conversation I had with her is what I want people to have after seeing my film: Where did it come from?, In a way, she said, that discussion is more important than specific techniques on how to spot deepfakes because the technology is going to get better so fast., At the moment, she added, most deepfakes you can spot with the naked eye., France isnt hiding his. So I was following the footsteps of my heroes. His companions were two guides hed hired. Every step of the way, things were air-gapped to defend against hacks. Anyone can read what you share. [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.[1]. Since 2016, Chechnya's tyrannical leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has waged a depraved operation to "cleanse the blood" of LGBTQ+ Searing urgency is a guiding force as Welcome . Theyre one of Hollywoods brightest starsand most troubled actors. Courtroom porn and social media have turned innocent bystanders into a mass of mudslingers. 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 Twitter has blocked the account of the Frontal program, which is aired on the German ZDF TV channel. They have . His bigoted policies and authoritarian behavior make him just as bad a pick for the top job in Washington. (The Get Out director Jordan Peele tried to raise awareness with an eerie deepfake of Barack Obama.) Its a matter of trusting the process.. People were "disappeared.". It comes midway through the HBO documentary that premieres June 30, so we've already met the Russian LGBT activists who help Chechen gays and lesbians flee the republic's anti-gay purge. Sustenance Without Sacrifices: Towards Equitable Workplaces, Sound Advice: How to Ensure Your Audio Playback Comes Through Loud and Clear, Documentary Sound: Setting up a Wireless System, 'The Rescue' Recounts the 2018 Thailand Cave Mission, Go with the Flow: Streamlining Your Post-Production Process, How Hidden Cameras Captured a Daring Rescue in 'Welcome to Chechnya'. 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. He embedded himself with Isteev and another activist, Olga Baranova, and began filming some of the young people who turned to them for help. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax And France had even more horrifying clips that he held back. Thank you! After the initial gains of the Russian army, the Chechen rebels demonstrated a . Welcome To Chechnya (2020): Official Trailer | HBO. 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. Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing, U.S. Within two weeks of David France reading an article in The New Yorker about the persecution of LGBTQ people in Chechnya, he was on a plane headed to Moscow. None of that is included in the film. 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. Eventually he opted for advanced facial replacement techniques using artificial intelligence and novel visual effects technology so the viewer could see real faces displaying real emotions while still protecting the identities of the speakers. With Olga Baranova, David Isteev, Ramzan Kadyrov, Maxim Lapunov. Documentarian David France faced an unenviable challenge with his latest film, "Welcome to Chechnya.". He is confronted over the allegation that LGBT citizens have been getting abducted and tortured by his regime. 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 have group therapy sessions about it to process the work that we had gone through.. Sometimes thats a tall order. Those are the stories that have really fascinated me the way that their activists handle these challenges and the specter of death. Welcome to Chechnya pays important tribute to the courage of its subjects, including activists like Isteev and Baranova, who risk their own persecution and exposure. The story that it followed had started back in 2017, with a crack-down by the authorities in the southern republic of Chechnya that saw widespread police torture of gay men; in a society where concepts of family shame and honour killing remain absolutely real, victims were then handed over to their families, most probably to be murdered by them, the same fate awaiting women as well. And that included extreme security protocols while filming in Chechnya encrypting the footage and smuggling it out of the country. To remain inconspicuous, only amateur camera gear was used on the film. Ad Choices. (Weve come a long way from slapping black bars over their eyes or sitting in a shadow on Dateline.) Theres a gasp-inducing moment when Grisha goes public and the digital augmentations drop away, revealing his real face for the first time. Very expensive proposition has become even welcome to chechnya what happened to anya expensive goes public and the whole world cares of,. 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