‘Welcome to Chechnya’ Goes Behind Enemy Lines and Documents the Systematic ‘Honor Killings’ of LGBT People

Journalist turned filmmaker David France (How to Survive a Plague and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson) turns his eye towards the horrors happening on Chechnya in his new film debuting at Sundance 2020.

According to The Wrap, “With “Chechnya,” France goes behind enemy lines in an ongoing crisis: the systematic beatings, torture and “honor killings” of LGBT people under the Putin-backed regime of strongman dictator Ramzan Kadyrov. The government claims that there are no queer people in the country, but as we learn from first-hand testimony from the film’s courageous subjects — and from terrifying cellphone footage of violent acts — they have been forced into silence in a country where families are encouraged to shun, report and even kill their own “deviant” family members.”

Variety says of the film, “It all amounts to a social “cleansing” project by Chechnya’s head of state Ramzan Kadyrov, a gun-loving far-right thug who denies the existence of such a campaign as vehemently as he denies the existence of any gay people in his republic at all. “We have no such people here,” he cheerfully tells U.S. sportscaster Bryant Gumbel in an excerpted 2017 interview. “To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them.” It’s clear Kadyrov gets his fake-news credentials from his Russian superior Vladimir Putin; the system that Isteev and his fellow activists, including grittily determined lesbian Olga Baranova, find themselves up against is in such profoundly corrupt denial, it’s all but impossible to fight.