by Kevin Fallon

Welcome to Chechnya, a documentary that debuted this week at the Sundance Film Festival ahead of a premiere on HBO this summer, has left audiences in Park City in shock, heartbreak, and outrage. Directed by David France, who previously helmed How to Survive a Plague and The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson, the film spotlights the crisis by following those brave few and the persecuted Russians whose lives they are saving by risking their own.

The film reveals an underground pipeline of activists working tirelessly to secretly remove at-risk LGBT+ Chechens and those who have survived being detained from the republic, transport them to safe houses, provide them with financial and psychological support, and help sneak them out of the country and find asylum.

“If they don’t kill you, you’re a winner,” says David Isteev, one of the activists who heads up the operation.

France was inspired to go to Russia after reading Masha Gessen’s New Yorker article, “The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya’s Purge,” which reported the accounts of Chechen survivors.

It is one thing to hear survivors use words to describe abuse; we can project whatever we need to onto words in order to protect ourselves from a graphic reality. It is wholly another to bear witness to what is happening to these people, the harm being inflicted on people for no other reason than their sexual orientation—who they are attracted to, who they love.

It’s a horrific and shameful reality about where we are as a human race that even now in the year 2020, a person who thinks about their sexuality intrinsically and viscerally associates it with death. Read more via Daily Beast