Welcome to Chechnya Review

In 2017, the Chechen Republic - a small, closed-off section of the greater nation of Russia - began a viscous crackdown on LGBTQ+ minorities. A traditionally religious and conservative nation, their leaders and law enforcement began to detain gay individuals and brutally torture them before encouraging their families to kill them to erase the shame they brought upon them. While the Chechen and Russian governments denied the accounts and refused to investigate, it was clear that something needed to be done.

Throughout the next couple of years, LGBTQ+ activists worldwide have worked to extract gay, lesbian and transgender individuals out of Chechnya and help them to seek asylum in foreign countries. These activists put their lives in danger to get in and out of Chechnya - a place where even gays foreign to them can be detained and tortured upon entering. Many of these people are in danger from their own families, and all have to go into hiding. Not all of them make it out even after being extracted.

Welcome to Chechnya is a documentary from award-winning David France (How to Survive a Plague) that follows these activists and a few of the individuals they've helped in a safe room in Moscow. Their stories are frightening, disturbing, and heartbreaking, and the film as a whole is not for the faint of heart; there are stories of - and even depictions of, in the form of intercepted video footage - lynching, beating, torture, interrogation, familial abuse and even sexual assault. The Chechen government openly views them as subhuman, and does everything in their power to violently silence them.

It would have been very easy or Welcome to Chechnya to cross the line and unintentionally revel in its depictions of human suffering and oppression - to essentially become a source of shocking misery porn that drowns out its own intent. It never crosses that line though - it never even really comes close to it. It's focus is always on the humanity of its subjects, on the toll their experiences take on them and their families but on the bonds that tie them together and give them a cause to fight. The sheer cruelty and absurdity of punishing someone based on their love and sexuality is put on full display; these people simply want to live their lives as themselves, yet they are forced into hiding because of who they love.

Welcome to Chechnya is a shocking and eye opening portrait of the struggle in Chechnya - and Russia as a whole - for LGBT rights, and for that reason alone I think it's something people should watch, because this sort of injustice needs to be exposed. At the same time, I wish its ending was a bit less ambiguous about where things stand now. It doesn't seem like much has changed since the events of this documentary took place, and perhaps that is the point, but the ambiguity leaves a bit of an uncertainty about what precisely should be done about this situation, and how one can help.

Still, it's a powerful and sobering documentary that's a testament to the importance of the medium. Furthermore, its an important artifact re-humanizing the victims of a dehumanizing, genocidal campaign. A humanitarian crisis was and still is ongoing in Chechnya, and the whole world needs to see what's really going on.