'Welcome to Chechnya' Trailer Highlights Hidden Gay Atrocities

After exploring the AIDS crisis and the life of Marsha P. Johnson, filmmaker David France is back.

Neal Broverman

Neal Broverman is the Editorial Director, Print of Pride Media, publishers of The Advocate, Out, Out Traveler, and Plus, spending more than 20 years in journalism. He indulges his interest in transportation and urban planning with regular contributions to Los Angeles magazine, and his work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. He lives in the City of Angels with his husband, children, and their chiweenie.

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Neal Broverman

May 21 2020 6:00 PM EST

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Welcome to Chechnya, the third film from gay documentarian David France, will debut June 30 on HBO.

The movie's trailer highlights the furtive escape efforts of LGBTQ+ people from Chechnya, a semi-autonomous Russian region. Chechen officials in recent years targeted LGBTQ+ people, kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing, and even killing some.

France -- who most recently made 2017's The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson and was Oscar-nominated for his 2012 film How to Survive a Plague -- highlights the state-sanctioned terror in his latest film and features an infamous clip from former Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov where he claims gay people don't exist in Chechnya.

Welcome to Chechnya was lauded at film festivals last year, reports IndieWire. Not only does the film intimately capture the life-or-death efforts to save gay people, it employs a novel face-swapping technology that adds anonymous facial features to victims who cannot display their identity on camera.

Watch the trailer below.

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