Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week we are looking at the latest film from the Oscar-nominated director of How to Survive a Plague.
By Glenn Dunks
We may find ourselves every June celebrating “pride”, but it is important to remember that it started from a fireball of anger. A fist of societal and cultural agitation that in a single moment decided it was going to fight back against oppression and violence. It may be more than 50 years later, but it’s an unfortunate fact that even in the most modern of societies, people who identify as LGBTIQ or non-binary still face the world with varying degrees of awareness about our otherness. And while many may not choose to dwell on it, there is the ever-present knowledge that those like us around the world are being bullied, harassed, targeted, punished, hunted and killed on a daily basis --and that’s before we get into when sexuality and gender identity intersect with race, religion and nationality.
It’s hardly hidden but it can be easily neglected, which is where a film like David France’s Welcome to Chechnya comes in...
Like his last two features, the Oscar-nominated How to Survive a Plague (my no. 10 doc of the decade) and the Netflix-released The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, David France’s latest captures extraordinary acts of underground activism. But this time, he does so in the present day amid the deadly and frequently invisible war against homosexuals in the republic of Chechnya. It’s a film that centres itself on the here and now, on the frontlines of contemporary queer politics with unflinching tenacity.
The compelling doc focuses primarily on three individuals: two of the extractors, David Isteev (crisis intervention coordinator for The Russia LGBT Network) and Olga Baranova (director of the Moscow Community Center for LGBTI+ Initiatives), plus torture survivor Maxim Lapunov. Their stories are intercut with their interactions with other survivors as well as disturbing and graphic footage of Chechen hate-crimes, the very reason for the actions of the film’s subjects.
I had naturally assumed that France had directed more in the capacity of building a narrative around assembled footage captured on camera phones, cheap digital cameras and low-fi GoPro cameras. But France himself was embedded in this crew, initially posing as a tourist to get up close and personal with these state-sanctioned hate crimes, the queer men and women they directly target and the brave activists who put their own lives on the line to get them out of Chechnya and eventually into undisclosed foreign locations where they will live, unallowed to return home. Filming in confidence that he would protect the identities of all involved, the vision he has collected is appropriately rough, which only seeks to make it more immediate.
This lack of polish may be why he and editor Tyler H. Walk occasionally play the film as some sort of clandestine thriller. But France is smart and his handling of the material nonetheless has vigour. Welcome to Chechnya pulses and often draws breath from the viewer as the team work to smuggle LGBTIQ Chechens and Russians out to safety, reuniting them with family and partners, and attempting to not being targets themselves.
Perhaps most remarkably, France has utilised visual effects artist Ryan Laney, the man behind The Matrix Revolutions’ swarming sentinals, to create ‘deep fake’ on-screen visualizations to protect his subjects' identities. Far removed from the use of blur, pixilation or shadowy back-lit confessionals, the effect allows for France to keep the drama bound to the victims’ identities, even if their faces aren't their own.
It is at first quite discombobulating with an effect similar to that of an extreme use of the facetune app where people’s faces are ringed almost like a halo. It takes a remarkably short amount of time to cease being a distraction, and when coupled often with new voices, it proves to be a smart if unexpected directorial gamble. By the time Lapunov’s digital mask melts away in front of us as he goes public with his claims and is replaced by the real man underneath, it proves oddly moving. Like a weight has been lifted, a new technologic coming out on screen.
Welcome to Chechnya is an exceptional work of documentary. Brave and confronting in ways that many filmmakers could only hope for. It finds moments of community and queer togetherness that put the purge-like violence into stark contrast, highlighting the barbaric nature of these crimes that the world should know about for longer than a 24-hour news cycle. And as its heroic subjects attest several times, it could ultimately happen anywhere.
Release: Airs on HBO on June 30st and on BBC Four on July 1st.
Oscar chances: Definitely. How to Survive a Plague was a nominee ten years ago (surprisingly, I felt, considering the subject matter) and this is France’s most prominent title since with enough social importance and filmmaking bravura to get it at least onto the shortlist. Considering how the rest of the year rolls out, I can see it making the final five if the branch responds to either its dramatic weight or its how’d-they-do-that heft.