Welcome to Chechnya: filming the battle to save LGBTQ Russians from an ‘anti-gay purge’

In February 2017, police in the Russian region of Chechnya arrested a man on purported drugs charges. But when his phone was searched, officers found something else: messages that identified the man as gay. He was tortured until he gave up names of others in the local LGBTQ community, leading to further detentions and confessions. The procedure snowballed, kickstarting what has since become known as Chechnya’s “anti-gay purge”.

France learned of the gay purge in the summer of 2017 and immediately travelled to Moscow. There he met two of the key figures in his film: Olga Baranova of the Moscow Community Centre, an LGBTQ initiative that helps to run the safehouses that accommodate on-the-run Chechens; and David Isteev of the Russian LGBT Network, who helps to organise and conduct the extractions themselves. Speaking from Russia, Isteev tells me that both he and his charges were initially reticent about the idea of being filmed. “People were afraid of the press. No one wanted to tell their stories, or to make themselves known [for fear of reprisals]. But at a certain point we realised that if we didn’t establish concrete contact, work with [France], then the story would probably be told differently, and that would be even worse.”

France’s presence also acted as insurance should a mission go wrong. “Even if people didn’t know I was travelling with them, I would be secretly recording and that would be useful if anything were to happen to them,” he explains. Playing the part of an American tourist, the director accompanied Isteev and his team on four trips to Chechnya, one of which forms a central part of the finished film: the extraction of “Anya”, a 21-year-old queer woman threatened with sexual extortion by her uncle and fearing death at the hands of her father.

The most striking example of this doctoring, which helped make waves after the film’s Sundance premiere earlier this year, is its innovative use of “face doubles” to conceal the identities of the Chechen survivors. This method, which has never been used in a feature film before, involves mapping the digitally modelled faces of volunteers (mostly LGBTQ activists from New York) onto the footage, replacing the real faces of these vulnerable people with a kind of VFX “mask”. It is a radical move that served a dual purpose: it allowed the survivors, who will likely fear reprisals for the rest of their lives even if they do escape Russia, to feel comfortable welcoming the director into their lives; and it allowed France to capture moments of real human emotion, to “show the humanity of these people, let us feel their journey, see in their souls.”

The face doubling, which produces a slightly fuzzy aura around the heads of those onscreen, is undoubtedly uncanny. Yet it also helps to underscore one of the recurrent themes of the documentary: the simultaneous fragility and resilience of identity. The Chechen authorities want to erase these people on account of their sexuality. (In one infamous interview with an American TV network, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov stated that reports of the anti-gay purges could not be true because gay people simply didn’t exist in his republic: “We don’t have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them.”) If they manage to escape, they must adopt new names and face a life in the shadows; in the film, we see whole families uprooted, literally overnight. Yet the continued existence of these victims is also a rejoinder to and evidence for the murderous impulses of the regime.

This is powerfully brought home in the strand of the film that follows “Grisha”, a Russian event planner who was arrested and tortured while visiting Grozny on a work trip. After fleeing the country with his boyfriend and family, Grisha makes the remarkably brave decision to return to Russia and file the first official legal complaint against the Chechen authorities — something no one had dared to do before. As he sits before flashing cameras at his first public press conference, the digital masking that we have grown so accustomed to disappears to reveal his true face for the first time. We learn his real name: Maksim Lapunov. It is a deeply moving moment, proof positive of a Russian idiom that Isteev is fond of: “There’s no case if there’s no body.”

Correspondingly, France understands the situation in Chechnya as an extreme example of what he calls the “rightward movement around the globe on questions of the LGBTQ community.”

“Putin climbed up over the bodies of a reignited culture war around queer freedoms.” he says. “It works, fomenting homophobia. It works to consolidate authoritarian power. What this story tells us is that what seems like ‘pragmatic’ homophobia coming out of the Kremlin reaches down to people who behave in extreme and horrific ways. Ramzan Kadyrov is merely the end of the whip that Putin is swinging.” For their part, the United States has not accepted a single refugee from Chechnya out of the 151 who have been resettled in the last two years. “Even queer folx in the US who consume queer news don’t know about this,” France notes. “This should be a global outcry and that’s what I want my film to help sponsor in some way.”

As for David Isteev, now too recognisable to travel to Chechnya yet refusing to give up the fight, his hopes for the film are simple. “It’s very important for us that people start talking about this, protesting publicly, because it’s hard to do that in Russia. People can protest outside embassies. They can petition their foreign ministries. We want pressure put on Russia to investigate these crimes.” Ultimately, this is not just a story about farflung Russian republics. Impunity can travel as easily as solidarity, as Isteev is all too aware: “If no investigation into these crimes is carried out, then no one is safe anywhere.”