107 min | NR | June 30, 2020 | HBO Documentary Films
In Chechnya, the government runs a campaign to round up, torture, and disappear gay men. A small group of activists smuggles the survivors out before the police or their own families can kill them. The camera follows people who cannot afford to be seen.
David France documents the anti-gay purge inside Chechnya and the underground network that fights it. Activists run a clandestine shelter system that extracts targeted men and women, hides them, and moves them across borders. The film tracks the daily mechanics of this work. It also tracks the cost paid by the people who do it and the people they save. The subject is a state-sponsored extermination campaign, but the real subject is what it takes to survive being marked for death by your own country.
David Isteev and Olga Baranova run the rescue operation with exhaustion and resolve. Isteev fields panicked phone calls and makes triage decisions that determine who lives. Baranova manages the safe houses and the constant fear of exposure. Maxim Lapunov becomes the spine of the film when he decides to go public and file criminal charges against the men who tortured him. His face, unmasked in the final stretch, lands with a force the film has spent its length preparing.
France and co-writer Tyler H. Walk build the film around a problem of visibility. The subjects must remain unrecognizable, so France uses digital face replacement to graft new faces onto the survivors while preserving their expressions. The technique sounds like a gimmick and instead becomes the film’s moral architecture. A faint shimmer outlines each protected face, a constant reminder that these people are being hunted. The editing, recognized at Sundance, cuts between hidden-camera extractions and intimate shelter footage to sustain dread without manufacturing it.
This is reporting that refuses the safety of distance. France embeds inside the rescue work and lets the danger sit in the frame instead of narrating it away. The film names the architecture of the purge and the indifference of the federal government that permits it. Putin and Kadyrov appear only in official footage, and their absence from the human story is the point. The activists do the work the state will not, and the film honors that work without pretending it is winning.