“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)
