Welcome to Chechnya - Metro Weekly - July 9 2020

Since 2017, a deadly anti-gay
“cleansing” has threatened the
survival of LGBTQ people living
inside the Chechen Republic.
The nation’s Putin-supported leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, proudly
denies the purge, despite reports from victims, survivors, and
their families of brutal atrocities. A brave few have rendered
official testimony before government commissions, and spoken
directly to the media. Their ongoing battle to bring the truth to
light, and justice to the abused, took a significant step forward
with the Pride Month premiere of HBO’s must-see, real-time
documentary Welcome to Chechnya.
Slipping behind the Chechen Republic’s iron curtain of
intolerance to shoot a film required extreme preparation and
precision for director David France and his crew. “The people
who were at real risk were the Chechens who were making their
escapes,” says France of the documentary’s subjects. The film
follows queer rebels like Anya, a 21-year old fleeing the country
with help from an underground network of activists led by
Russian LGBT Network emergency program coordinator David
Isteev. “The second level of danger,” France adds, “was for the
activists who were doing that work.”
Urgency permeates nearly every scene, as the film, embedded
with Isteev’s operation, stops in a Moscow safe-house run
by activist Olga Boronova, and races towards freedom with
formerly detained gay couple Grisha and Bogdan. Yet, France
— the Oscar-nominated director of the essential HIV-AIDS documentary
How to Survive a Plague — insists he never felt in peril
for himself, thanks to thorough planning. “We created these
levels of deniability,” he explains. “When we were in public, it
was not known that I was working with anybody else in that
public setting. If discovered, I would just be my own person and
explain that I was a tourist or whatever. But, hopefully, not let it
be known that what I was filming was these daring extractions
of people.”
The filmmaker and crew kept their shoot undercover by porting
around decoy devices. “I had a cellphone that I filled with
tourist photographs. I had cards for my camera that were evidence
of my having been a tourist and nothing else. I made sure
to create a fictional explanation for what I was doing that always
separated me from what the activists were doing and what the
survivors were doing.”
Stealth allowed France to emerge with startling footage supporting
the testimony of refugees like Grisha and Bogdan, both
eyewitnesses to the regime’s campaign of detention and torture.
And digital subterfuge was required to cloak the refugees’ identities,
since, even beyond Chechnya’s borders, there are forces that
aggressively pursue those who escape in order to silence them.
“That's why they're being protected with different faces,” says
executive producer Neal Baer, “because the Chechen diaspora
has received word to eliminate these people wherever they are.”
Baer, who joined the project after the filming, lauds the courage
of all of the onscreen participants, and the director. “I'm
proud of David, and I'm grateful to the refugees and the activists
for allowing David to film. This was a film made by a lot of people.
But David [earns] the praise for what he's done.”
France, in turn, hails those who entrusted their stories
to this movie and its producers, who also include How to
Survive a Plague collaborator Joy Tomchin and actor Jesse Tyler
Ferguson. A former investigative journalist for Newsweek, GQ,
and New York Magazine, France took every precaution to assure
the film’s subjects of the utmost discretion. “We were filming
people's faces, people whose identities could never be known,
and promising them that we would protect the footage that we
were shooting, that we would never let it out of our hands. We
would never put it in a place where it could ever be intercepted.”
Having successfully evaded enemy interception, Welcome
to Chechnya exposes this shocking story to a world roiled by
the uncertainty of a pandemic, and unprecedented financial,
political, and social upheaval. Adding to the 2020 deluge, the
situation for LGBTQ Chechens won’t be improved by recent
developments in mother Russia, where voters just approved a
ban on same-sex marriage. And, no surprise, under the current
presidential administration, no Chechen asylum seekers have
been granted safe haven in the United States.
But France sees signs of hope in those who have found safer
haven, like Bogdan and Grisha, the latter of whom discloses his
true identity in the film as Russian-born Maxim Lapunov. The
couple were on hand for the film’s world premiere at the 2020
Sundance Film Festival, “a really exciting moment,” France recalls.
“I saw them next in Berlin, and they came with Maxim's
mother. It was just really wonderful to see them meeting
their audience, and understanding what they had accomplished
already through their act of bravery, in coming forward and
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JULY 9, 2020 • METROWEEKLY.COM