“a moving and vital indictment of mass persecution.” (New York Times)
David France is perhaps the most important gay rights activist we have today. He was Oscar-nominated for his 2012 doco How to Survive a Plague, a thorough and absorbing chronicle of the AIDS crisis. With characteristic courage he takes on the atrocious situation in Russian-dominated Chechnya, where the government denies the existence of gay people while simultaneously subjecting them to a campaign of imprisonment, rape, and torture. There are many human faces to this tragedy: homosexual men and women trying to stay underground until they can flee the country, and the support organisations whose leaders risk everything to shelter them. A film of searing urgency.
“Welcome to Chechnya is a horror movie, but it’s also a collective profile in courage. You can’t say that “such people” are not here. They are, and they’re not just heroes, the movie suggests. They’re the last thing standing between survival and a purge.” (Rolling Stone)
“may leave you beyond a place words can adequately describe” (salon.com)
“a formidably tense, real-life drama” (Toronto Globe and Mail)
David France
David France is an American journalist who was fired from the New York Post for being gay, and then became a senior editor for Newsweek. His work, often on gay themes, has been published in many leading magazines and he has three books of non-fiction to his credit. His previous films are: How to Survive a Plague (2012), and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017).
