Welcome to Chechnya: The Gay Purge, review: a heart-stopping account of those fleeing persecution
"Imagine in the 21st century, in a supposedly secular country, people who are killed simply because they are homosexual.” This is the horrifying reality in Chechnya. Gay people are abducted, tortured, forced to give up their friends; if they are not killed in custody – because this purge is state-sanctioned – they are released back to their families, who are told to kill them for the sake of honour.
It is a story that has been relayed in news reports; you may have read about it in this newspaper. But Welcome to Chechnya: The Gay Purge (BBC Four) brought home the horror with a dramatic urgency. David France’s grimly compelling film was a docu-thriller, with heart-stopping moments as activists spirited people out of the country in clandestine operations.
The identities of the gay men and women were masked with digital face transplants. There have been warnings about this technology before and its potential use in “deep fake” videos, but here it served an important purpose: allowing us to see the fear and worry and fleeting moments of hope and relief, which we could never have got from a silhouette.
After a few seconds registering the visual weirdness of this, it was no longer noticeable. Instead, I was drawn into the lives on screen. “Grisha”, a Russian, had taken up work in Chechnya. He was grabbed from the street, imprisoned and tortured for days in a basement. Every night they brought in new people. Grisha still heard their screams in his nightmares.
We saw Grisha and others huddled in a Moscow safehouse, where one boy attempted suicide. They hoped for visas to begin new lives abroad. “Anya”, 21, was the lesbian daughter of a high-ranking official. David Isteev and Olga Baranova, the brave souls who run the Russian LGBT Network and organise the escapes, placed her alone in a bleak little apartment for her own safety. But after six months of loneliness and claustrophobia, she left. No one knows where she is now. The same goes for Zelim Bakayev, a Chechen pop star who went missing in 2017 after visiting Grozny for his sister’s wedding. He is presumed dead.
With great courage, Grisha went public with his real identity: Maxim Lapunov. His digital face mask fell away. He gave a press conference calling for action, but to little effect. Chechnya’s smirking leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, given free rein by Vladimir Putin in return for political support, told an interviewer that there is no purge because “we don’t have such people here. They are subhuman”. Isteev said this story needs a proper ending. But a happy ending, from what this film showed us, is a world away.
