"Welcome to Chechnya" - "If they don't kill us, we win." Documentary films are becoming increasingly important in modern cinema. Having acquired its status and a new shade, the fact has grown how far non-fiction film directors are willing to go in order to reliably present their own idea. The new film by documentary director David Francis was first shown at the American film festival Sundance in January of this year, where he received a special jury prize for editing. Critics’ assessments made it clear that the Oscar nominee (for the film “How to survive the plague”) shot not just a documentary, but a very bold, in every sense, picture.
This story began in the spring of 2017 in Chechnya. Then began a massive massacre of people of homosexual orientation. Torture, interrogation and all this under threat of death. The worst part is that the authorities shrugged off the news and no one tried to charge the killers. In fact, these are the events around which the picture unfolds. But David not only touches on the events of the 17th year - it is just a background, he builds a picture on the history of a special shelter where Russian activists helped and smuggled gays and lesbians abroad. The director not only talks about the terrible fates of gay people, but also about what it is like to be a human rights defender of such people. First of all, it reveals the difficult fates of David and Olga, people who are not just rescuers of other people’s fates, but also those who put their own lives and the lives of their relatives on the mark.
David Francis reveals a narrow theme about LGBT rights activists. As you know, there are more and more films in our time that study the difficult fates of people of different orientations, but few people touched the topic of human rights defenders – those who most often remained on the sidelines. These people just want to help. Not out of profit, not out of reputation, they just realize how scary this world sometimes gets. A world where true love is not valued. A world where moral laws no longer exist. David and Olga, the main characters in the film, are not superheroes, they are those whose spiritual faith in this world is still alive. They both believe in true love, no matter with whom or why, the main thing is that the love between those they save is pure and true. We have before us a real world, in this case Russia, in which real human feelings continue to be despised and where human rights are only an invalid clause enshrined in the Constitution. And in our time, the right to love someone is not just to put yourself in danger, but to put your relatives in danger.
When you watch a documentary, I think people often think about what the filmmakers have to go through to capture a particular shot. So, when you watch "Welcome to Chechnya", when you begin to visit such thoughts, your heart freezes, and goosebumps run through your body, as if from the cold. You feel uncomfortable looking into the eyes of the reality that actually happened. This is not a feature film with scripted dialogues - this is a captured time that separates the viewer only by the screen for which you are just afraid to get.
"Welcome to Chechnya" is one of the most daring documentaries that tells not only about the events of the 17th year, but also takes a separate story of human rights defenders of the LGBT community. The film artistically tells about several fates of the characters, each of which consists of its own personal history. At the same time, the director lays in the main message not only that you need to be more tolerant, the main idea here lies in how cruel and terrible the world is becoming today. It is a film of gratitude to all those who sacrifice themselves for people who know more about human feelings than all those who try to destroy them. Eternal destruction.
9 out of 10