The pandemic-inflicted movie year hasn’t had a short supply of great docs: Sasha Neulinger’s “Rewind,” Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s “Athlete A,” James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham “Crip Camp,” Benjamin Ree’s “The Painter and the Thief,” and Spike Jonze’s “Beastie Boys Story” — all well worth a look, if you haven’t already checked them out.
Now, here comes another knockout of non-fiction filmmaking. It’s impossible to shake off David France’s “Welcome to Chechnya,” which deals with what faces gay, lesbian, and transgender Chechens on a daily basis — the blatant homophobia in their home country is filled with the denial of their humanity. France, a former journalist turned filmmaker, tackles the aggressive effort by Russian-backed Chechnya to entirely erase LGBTQ from their population. Call it a “purge,” if you will, but that would unfairly simplify the human rights atrocities committed by this Putin-backed government into just a single, measly word.
Following two Chechens fleeing their country and connecting with David Isteev, the Crisis Response Coordinator of the Russian LGBT Network, and Olga Baranova, director of the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives, this is a film about people who accept to disappear, and strip their identities away, if it means they can somehow live another day. The LGBTQ organizations operating at low-level secrecy here do so with a real sense of danger. France’s camera follows them in a you-are-there approach that makes the dread-filled atmosphere feel more like a nail-biting thriller than any sort of documentary. Despite being in a Russian safe house, nobody feels safe, especially not 30-year-old “Grisha” and the 21-year-old Muslim lesbian, “Anya,” the latter escaping her uncle’s wrath after he pledged to out her to government officials if she didn’t give in and have daily sex with him.
There is also nothing ordinary about the way the republic’s bearded, ultra-macho leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, operates his country. He is all about cultural purity, so much so that he has insisted for years to the media that Chechnya actually has no gay people living there. France adds archival news clips of Kadyrov, along with security camera footage of citizens, government officials, and gangs persecuting gay Chechens all over the country. The result is nothing short of infuriatingly head-shaking.
A sense of danger looms all throughout “Welcome to Chechnya,” hell, some of the refugee’s faces are digitally “masked,” as a precaution, just in case government thugs ever try to find them. A Chechen genocide is happening and yet the world stands still, ignoring the plight of the victimized. This is where this doc’s importance comes in: maybe, just maybe it could illuminate more people to make a difference.
If the filmmaking itself, which seems to be going for a cinema verité style, can sometimes feel stylishly dry, it matters less here because the subject matter is so overwhelming. “Welcome to Chechnya” is not just filled with horror, but also with courage and strength. The miracles that France pulls off here is in giving us a life-and-death struggle caught on camera. It’s all happening before our very eyes, but part of the fury is that we feel so damn helpless while watching it. [B/B+]
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.