'Welcome to Chechnya' Review: Doc on LGBTQ Persecution Is Urgent Wake-Up Call

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HBO doc 'Welcome to Chechnya' takes on the Russian republic's violent anti-LGBTQ campaign—and profiles the brave souls fighting it. It's essential viewing. Our review

This is what faces gay, lesbian and transgender Chechens on a daily basis — both a denial of their humanity and an active, aggressive effort to erase them them entirely. A former journalist turned documentarian, France has gone broad in examining the early days of responding to the AIDS epidemic and narrow in looking back on the murder of a gay-rights pioneer .

The sense of danger experienced by these underground-railroad facilitators, the people who use them and the director himself himself is palpable; more than person describedas the equivalent of a “docu-thriller” after its premiere at Sundance this past January.

And while there initially isn’t much background on the two fugitive subjects — the 30-year-old “Grisha” and the 21-year-old Muslim lesbian “Anya” — you quickly understand why. It bears mentioning that all of the LGBTQ subjects attempting to find passage out of the Eastern bloc have their faces digitally “masked,” a safety measure that introduces an uncanny-valley element into the mix.

Yet it’s important to France that his subject willingly stepping into the spotlight, and the clandestine efforts to combat the Chechen government’s attempt at genocide, get as much screen time and lip service as the terror on display.is a horror movie, but it’s also a collective profile in courage. You can’t say that “such people” are not here. They are, and they’re not just heroes, the movie suggests. They’re the last thing standing between survival and a purge.

 

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