The people chronicled in Frances film have pictures on their phones documenting the torture they suffered, some of which we see. Since 2017, Chechnya's tyrannical leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has waged a depraved operation to "cleanse the blood" of LGBTQ Chechens, overseeing a government-directed campaign to detain, torture and execute them. The film splits focus between her story and that of Grisha, a torture victim and Russian national who after much deliberation decides to come forward and file a criminal complaint, hoping to expose these atrocities on the world stage. The film follows the work of activists rescuing survivors of torture in Chechnya. Playing the aunties are cameraperson Alexandra Ivanova and a female activist. But I found it remarkably effective in the way it lets these young men and women tell their stories and express a level of emotion that would have been lost if they had been filmed with blurred faces or in heavy shadows. The moment is extremely tense. So theres a lot of work to be done.. Without them, you could be considered a spy and spend many years in prison. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Will a documentary that expressly embraces the technique help matters? Ghastly. Here security guards inspect passports and sharply confer about one. All technology has a dual moral purpose, he argued. 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. But I knew I wanted to tell a much more in-depth story about what something as hideous as this meant to the people who survived it.. Vapid, unhinged, and in potentially compromising positions that could come back to haunt them. These are ghastly images, and I'm not convinced the film needed all of them to convey the full horror of what's going on. (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. And as in Frances first film, the people most in desperate need of help have once again been abandoned to their own devices. 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). Distressing. Its practically seamless more convincing than the de-aging in The Irishman, anyway and points to entire new worlds of possibility in documentary footage preserving peoples anonymity. Follow. Welcome to Chechnya, directed by David France and produced by Alice Henty, David France, Askold Kurov, and Joy A. Tomchin, 2020, 107 minutes. And hes drawing some hope from the ongoing protests against racism taking place across the United States and around the world. 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. Those are the stories that have really fascinated me the way that their activists handle these challenges and the specter of death. 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 most nerve-wracking sequence in David Frances Welcome to Chechnya is, without doubt, the rescue of Anya. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax Since 2016, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has led a pogrom against the . They were horrible stories and theres no doubt that they were real, France, an Oscar-nominated activist filmmaker, said. Welcome to Chechnya. From acclaimed journalist and Oscar (R)-nominated director David France (How to Survive a Plague) comes this searing documentary about a group of brave activists risking their lives to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ campaign in the Russian republic of Chechnya--which has led to the torture and disappearance of untold numbers of people. 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. France included. For Anyas rescue operation, the Sony stayed home. To remain inconspicuous, only amateur camera gear was used on the film. Agents warned Ivanova she couldnt film. Instead, they edited the film in a windowless room in order to keep with security protocols. But there is not, of course, footage of them actually being tortured. What comes across is the ease with which a person can disappear in plain sight, for obvious reasons, and a governmentcommitted to its hateful pogromcan simply shrug it off. Courtroom porn and social media have turned innocent bystanders into a mass of mudslingers. 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.. In one video, an incarcerated man is sexually assaulted off-camera by police. 'Country Queers' shares the 'joy' and 'pain' of rural LGBTQ life, NYC's Queer Liberation March draws thousands, clashes with NYPD, Two New Yorkers vie to be first gay Black men in Congress. The Network helps him move to an undisclosed location in Europe with his boyfriend of 10 years. A lavalier mic (considered professional gear, thus suspect) was used when safely inside the shelter. . It was a gay purge. Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter for The Kyiv Independent, tweeted: "Magomed Tushayev, one of . Until it doesnt: In one of the films more breathtaking moments, the effects drop away after a gay refugee, Maksim Lapunov, reclaims his name and his real face at a news conference. His almost incredible sang froid was matched only by that of his colleague Olga Baranova. 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. After the initial gains of the Russian army, the Chechen rebels demonstrated a . They have . hide caption. Activist David Isteev, left, and a cohort organize an escape in a scene from 'Welcome to Chechnya.'. France even had a decoy phone with proof: downloaded soccer-fan photos and videos, stats about the Egyptian team, vistas with his tour guides. Chechen authorities let him go because he is not ethnically Chechen. The plan was for Ivanova to control her GoPro with a smartphone app, like Kurov did with his Sony. Its a human life, and she only had this one chance to run. Adding to the pressure, At this point, theres no second camera inside, so everything was on me., The next stress came at the roadside checkpoint, when security guards are troubled by one passport. Another substitute face, this time of Joy A. Tomchin, was also used to disguise one of the Chechens in the film. This visual strategy has a curious effect: you look at people without really being able to see them. Frances provocative solution is Welcome to Chechnya, the unsettling film that debuted Tuesday on HBO and involves extensive postproduction work: It marshals advanced computer technology to superimpose supple, completely fabricated faces over 23 hunted individuals. David France's daring documentary "Welcome to Chechnya" goes undercover to detail the actions of activists in response to the Chechen Republic's anti-gay purge. June 30, 2020. Welcome to Chechnya is a grimly ironic title for a documentary that plays like a chilling undercover thriller. David France, left, and the face-capture producer Johnny Han watch a volunteer in the studio. 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. He was twisting balloons into these elaborate sculptures and selling them to people in front of the main mall in Grozny, Chechnya. 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. Similarly harrowing, but also more hopeful, is the experience of a 30-year-old Russian businessman, here called "Grisha," who was detained and beaten for 12 days during a trip to Chechnya. Si su padre, miembro del gobierno checheno . Data was immediately moved off-camera cards and loaded in triplicate onto encrypted drives; one was smuggled out of the country and two remained hidden in Russia. The Russian LGBT Network moves her into an apartment where she must hole up for weeks on end, waiting for a travel visa that might never arrive. Chechnya runs itself as basically an autonomous entity, with a corrupt, oligarchic power structure . The First Chechen War explains a lot of what Russia and Putin are doing in Ukraine today: On New Year's Eve, 1994 Russian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles poured into the streets of Grozny with an assault expected to snuff out the self-declared Chechcen Republic of Ichkeria, as black smoke poured into the sky from oil tanks set ablaze by a dawn artillery bombardment. 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. 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. Patricia Thomson is a longtime film journalist and contributing writer for American Cinematographer. Managing to extricate men and women from there, they looked after them in safe houses in Moscow and elsewhere, before finally in the best outcome, at least relocating them to where they could live in safety. Kadyrov and his security forces have been widely accused by international human rights groups of extrajudicial arrests, torture and killings. And this changes nothing. Like most of the victims in Welcome to Chechnya, Grishas identity is hidden with deep fake technology. Chechnyas leader Ramzan Kadyrov is a Putin stooge straight out of central casting, coyly egging on the atrocities in his ridiculous weightlifter shirt. Welcome to Chechnya (2020) Plot Showing all 3 items Jump to: Summaries (2) Synopsis (1) Summaries A group of activists risk their lives fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in Chechnya. These scenes dont tell us nearly as much as the scenes in which we hear people speak about their experiences firsthandas one young man does, detailing his torture to his boyfriend, with whom he is joyfully able to reunite. 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. The step raises familiar questions about nonfiction movies. 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. / how old is aiger in beyblade burst rise / welcome to chechnya what happened to anya By 21 Feb 2022 This documentary, which airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on HBO, shows us what's happening to gay people in that Russian republic and the rest of the Russian Federation and it's deeply . They are tough. 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. Be a witness. Oscar-nominated filmmaker and former investigative journalist David France has a new documentary, Welcome To Chechnya, debuting on HBO June 30 th, which has already won multiple awards on the film festival circuit. But I also want people to know what the conditions are for LGBTQ people around the globeThere are still 70 countries where its a crime to be queer, and eight of those countries, and several other semi-autonomous regions like Chechnya is, consider it a crime worthy of the death penalty., As international borders are closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the activists in Moscow need even more help. 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. Like other refugees, Anya had her face replaced with a digital veil in post-production (see In Digital Disguise). Chechnya's been especially . For Welcome to Chechnya, he set up a secret editing suite and remained entirely offline while on the job. While Lapunovs identity is kept secret this way through most of the film, his real face is shown when he goes to court to sue the Russian government for failing to protect him from what his lawyers argue was unlawful arrest, detention, torture and discrimination. (The films cinematographer, Askold Kurov, stepped aside for this mission since its cover story required a female camera operator.). With Olga Baranova, David Isteev, Ramzan Kadyrov, Maxim Lapunov. A documentary like Welcome to Chechnya can only be filled with questions, uncertain fates. Quite popular in Russia, GoPro is a camera everybody can have, with no questions asked, Ivanova says. I want people to know whats going on there. 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. Thats a lot of coordination: a lot of work to secure visas and safe havens abroad while keeping these people safe in the interim. And then to see it with an audience and to be able to introduce the people who were in the film to that audience it was a very gratifying experience.. When he was captured on the streets of Grozny, he had been selling balloon art. You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. I love her. But the greater part of the action of Welcome to Chechnya was caught on the move, with a disturbingly convincing tension, as the film followed various strands as they developed, unpredictably, in real time (its a considerable achievement, not least in editing, to make such an approach convincing rather than contrived). A film about persecuted gay and lesbian Chechens uses digital manipulation to guard their identities without losing their humanity. He also long covered the AIDS crisis, about which he wrote the award-winning book How to Survive a Plague, adapted from his Oscar-nominated 2012 documentary of the same title (which also debuted at Sundance). As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Its not a story about me, France says simply. To watch Frances latest is to be confronted by the moral dimensions of documentary filmmaking and maybe something deeper, concerning the slippery nature of identity itself. ET on HBO. From the start, a disclaimer states that certain subjects have been digitally disguised for their safety. Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February, the Russian government has shut down . Him move to an undisclosed location in Europe with his Sony across the United States and the. Links are at the top of the Russian government has shut down Anyas rescue operation the! Singled out for questioning: Where are you from that could come back haunt... 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