Sign Up Now Welcome to Chechnya (HBO) Genres original, documentary Runtime 1 hr 47 min Release Year 2020 About This Movie He denies the torture outright, in other words; so does the Kremlin. Before Anya even set foot in the restaurant, Ivanova got a warning scrawled on a napkin. 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. David wanted to tell the story as quickly and urgently as possible; there are enough examples, definitely. 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. [1] This documentary, which airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on HBO, shows us whats happening to gay people in that Russian republic and the rest of the Russian Federation and its deeply disturbing. They talk about their injuries and show us bruises that havent yet healed. Whats not obvious in the filmthough not on purposeis that this shot was taken from the backup teams taxi, not Anyas. 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. This technology allowed us to just stretch the facesover the images that I shot in the film. It's a bold gambit that may put off those who find it too duplicitous in the context of a documentary. Luckily, they had enough faith in me. Deepfake Technology Enters the Documentary World. Horrific. We witnessed the dramatic press conference, organised by Russias Committee against Torture, at which that happened, which was also the moment that the film let slip the visual technique that had allowed the director to mask the faces of his subjects (the pioneering effect essentially reverses the image-manipulating possibilities of DeepFake). On location, the team followed strict protocols with footage. Together with various support initiatives, they had come to oversee a network that had arisen almost spontaneously back in 2017 to respond to what was happening in Chechnya. One in particular sticks with me: a pop singer named Zelim Bakaev, who disappeared in 2017 and is thought to been captured, tortured, and murdered after attending his sisters wedding. People were "disappeared.". Welcome to Chechnya is a 2020 documentary film by American reporter, author and documentarian David France. Advocacy meets suspense in "Welcome to Chechnya," a chilling examination of both the brutality that the Chechen LGBT community is forced to face on a daily basis and the difficulty of leaving. Keeping people in hiding, taking care of people, keeping them safe and fed, and with medical care for this long extended period, while theyre still struggling with foreign governments to try to keep open that back door to humanitarian parole visas, France said. France is an award-winning journalist who has been a war correspondent in Central America. A film about persecuted gay and lesbian Chechens uses digital manipulation to guard their identities without losing their humanity. He was tortured by. Panetta recalled talking with her mother, who had sent her bad information about Covid-19. 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. Its not legal to encrypt in Russia, so we were taking a risk, France notes. 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. The main camera, operated by Kurov, was a Sony FDR-AX100 handycam. Two of these operations frame the narrative of Welcome to Chechnya: the exfiltration of a 21-year-old woman with the pseudonym Anya, whose uncle learned she is lesbian and threatened to expose her . Weve heard historical context, seen horrific trophy videos of assault and murder, and spent time in the secret shelter where queer refugees await visas. Disgraceful. During a drug raid, police found suggestive texts and photos on a man's cell phone that led them to believe he identified as gay. For Welcome to Chechnya, he set up a secret editing suite and remained entirely offline while on the job. I want them to feel responsible for doing something to help stop it., Donate to the newsroom now. Now Streaming. And yet, here is proof., France spent about 18 months filming in Moscow and Chechnya. 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. I wanted you to feel what he felt at that moment, France said. Certain hyped-up scenes, with their insistent music and TV expose vibe, fall flat precisely because they add an energy that this situation, an outright tragedy, shouldnt need in order to make its point. His bigoted policies and authoritarian behavior make him just as bad a pick for the top job in Washington. They were horrible stories and theres no doubt that they were real, France, an Oscar-nominated activist filmmaker, said. Many of the faces we see are actually the faces of people from outside Chechnya, who lent their likenesses to the film. (All refugees are assigned pseudonyms, such as Grisha and Anya.) 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. How would he shield the identity of at-risk gay and lesbian Chechens fleeing the region via a network of safe houses, while also preserving their emotions, their affections and expressions? 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. [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. 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. For securitys sake, Ivanova needed to use a burner phone rather than her own. Here security guards inspect passports and sharply confer about one. What we did was to borrow from the world of deepfakes and find this social justice use for it, he explained. With no help from the Kremlin and only faint global condemnation, activists take matters into their own hands. 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. It was a gay purge. By Neetha K Published on : 18:00 PST, Jun 30, 2020 . Their storylines are framed by the narrative . welcome to chechnya what happened to anya. 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. He called it an underblur or halo, intentionally added so youll be aware of the manipulation. [5], One of the refugees, Maxim Lapunov, is publicly identified in the film, as he sought, and failed, to get legal redress from Russian authorities.[6]. Thanks to the extraordinary access attained by France and company, were provided passenger seat views of daring midnight escapes and hair-raising trips through customs, with a percolating electronic score out of a Michael Mann picture. 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. . 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. and Anya, a young queer woman from Grozny, who wants to flee her powerful Chechen family. 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. With little emotion, the young man explains his scars as his boyfriend touches those spots and says nothing. Homosexuality and gender nonconformity have long been frowned upon in Chechen society. The cruelty is medieval, but the time is now. 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. In a sense, Welcome to Chechnya is an applied special effect that lasts an entire movie. Nonetheless, a camera inside the cab keeps recording. "People in Chechnya who are suspected of being lesbian, gay or bisexual, are facing a 'new wave of persecution' following a spate of killings involving torture, and other rights abuses," a group. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. One creative project thats come out of Harrells program, the Center for Advanced Virtuality, is a seven-minute video titled In Event of Moon Disaster. In it, a notorious 1969 speech written for Richard Nixon meant to be delivered only in the wake of a catastrophic Apollo 11 mishap is merged with the actual televised 1974 resignation speech, resulting in a spooky bit of alternative history. He covered the the Catholic Churchs sexual abuse scandal and wrote the bestselling book Our Fathers, which was turned into a Showtime movie. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2020 and was released on June 30, 2020, by HBO Films. 2020 documentary about the anti-LGBT purges in Chechnya, facial replacement techniques using artificial intelligence, Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature, Outstanding Directional Achievement in Documentary, Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking, "HBO Documentary Films Lands Sundance-Bound Welcome To Chechnya, About Harsh Plight Of LGBTQ Community In Russian Republic", "How Hidden Cameras Captured a Daring Rescue in 'Welcome to Chechnya'", "Sundance 2020: How VFX Pulled Welcome to Chechnya Out of the Shadows Exclusive", 'It Only Ends When They're Dead.' Uno de los casos que sigue el documental es el de "Anya", una joven pidiendo ayuda despus de que su to descubre su identidad homosexual. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. 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 . [3] The approach is a "game changer in identity protection," according to Documentary Magazine, and a brand new tool for documentary filmmakers. Twitter has blocked the account of the Frontal program, which is aired on the German ZDF TV channel. On one level, of course, Welcome to Chechnya looked to be about exactly that and on a more extreme level than anything weve seen before. 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. Here is an ongoing crime against humanity that has not generated the outrage that it deserves, said France, who earned an Oscar nomination for How to Survive a Plague, his 2012 directing debut about AIDS activists in the early days of the epidemic. Instead of masking or blurring their faces, theyre replaced digitally with a different face but the replacement images carry all the emotion of the victims. ), Everybody understood the importance of telling the story. Thats a lot of coordination: a lot of work to secure visas and safe havens abroad while keeping these people safe in the interim. Their operation, run from a discreet location that becomes a haven for escapees-in-wait, receives about 25 new refugees a month. His almost incredible sang froid was matched only by that of his colleague Olga Baranova. The activists are sure to remind us that this violence affects more than just cisgender gay men; the regime is equally perilous for cis women and trans people, though these other stories dont seem to travel nearly as far. If anything, the activists tell us, the women need more help escaping. 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 . HBO's chilling "Welcome to Chechnya" depicts the heroism of ordinary people caught in an LGBTQ purge Director David France's riveting documentary never feels safe as he illuminates a world of. 'Welcome to Chechnya' Review: A look at state-sanctioned torture, rape and murder of homosexuals in Russia. And I understood, of course.. Speaking by Zoom from London, she summed up the swirl of emotions nervousness, liberation, even possible enlightenment set off by deepfakes arrival in the documentary world. Everybody understood that this needed to be exposed, France said. Welcome to Chechnya: Directed by David France. Chechnya, there are no homosexuals. 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. 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. Activist David Isteev, left, and a cohort organize an escape in a scene from 'Welcome to Chechnya.'. France included. Their cover story is that Anya is meeting two family friends who are taking her dress-shopping. 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