Welcome to Chechnya

Welcome to Chechnya is the other potential contender for the Visual Effects Oscar I mentioned. Its listing in the shortlist is unprecedented for a documentary. Its visual tricks are necessary for its sensitive subject matter. Let's get going.

David France (How to Survive a Plague, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson) chronicles Chechen activists Olga Baranova and David Isteev. They've helped LGBT people escape state-sanctioned violence. Cops, relatives and strangers alike committed atrocities against them. The Chechen leader denied the violence, and the existence of LGBT-people in his country, but it's real. The film shows videos to prove it. 

That's where the visual effects come in. France disguised the featured refugees with face-swapping "Deep Fake" technology. The digital masks work pretty well. You might spend much of the film not even realizing there are visual effects. There's a few blurry seams, though, but they're not distracting. One of the refugees, "Grisha," is digitally unmasked before our eyes to reveal Maxim Lapunov, who tried to sue the Chechen Government for its abuse. 

We see the refugees in a safe house: their first stop before, hopefully, leaving the country. When Lapunov's boyfriend, "Bogdan," attempts suicide, they can't call an ambulance in fear of giving themselves away. Fortunately, he gets better, and his and Lapunov's relationship provide some levity in the story. The first depicted refugee, "Anya," disappears from a German safe house. We see reactions to the disappearance of gay pop star Zelim Bakaev and the unfair dismissal of Lapunov's case. Baranova and Isteev's mission to extract refugees is tense, justifiably so.

This is not a family friendly movie, at all. It's still a necessary story told in a necessary way. Be prepared for a bleak, and sometimes hopeful, 107 minutes if you decide to press play on HBOMax. Welcome to Chechnya is also one of the fifteen films cited for this year's Documentary Oscar. I'll just wait for the final five before I see the potentials.