David France’s Welcome to Chechnya
David France’s Welcome to Chechnya, which lifts the lid on rampant and violent homophobia in the Chechen Republic, is finding some of its biggest audiences in Russia. The film (screening in IDFA’s Best of Fests), is streaming legally for Russian audiences through the BBC Russia service. However, as France told BDE, the film has also been pirated so heavily that it has been seen millions of times.
“When the trailer first dropped in June with HBO and BBC Storyville, it was copied and hosted across social media platforms inside Russia. We could see that it went to a million views within 36 hours,” France recalls. “There was this incredible hunger for the film.”
The film itself soon began to be shown illegally. The “take down” notices issued by the BBC and HBO had only minimal effect.
France realised that his film was really getting under the authorities’ skins when Chechen TV made a 15 minute “news” report, featuring several of the country’s political bigwigs, condemning it.
However, when France showed the film in July to law makers in Washington, within 72 hours the US State Department issued sanctions against Ramzan Kadyrov, Head of the Chechen Republic, for crimes against the LGBTQ Chechen community. (Strongman Kadyrov was so irritated by this he issued his own sanctions against the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo).
The pirating of his documentary may have cost France and his team revenue but the director is not complaining.
“You don’t go into a project like this, or any social justice storytelling, with the idea of making money. You hope to be able to cover your costs,” the director stated. “When we saw the film being pirated in Russia, we cheered it because we wanted the people to see it.”
One of the ways the doc has been promoted throughout Russia is through the gay dating app Hornet. “They have been an incredibly aggressive partner with us,” France said of the app.
France and his crew were so exhausted at the end of making the documentary that they have undergone therapy. “For three years, we had been so very careful about everything – careful about strategies to make sure we don’t reveal locations; careful about protecting our footage; careful about keeping a total veil of secrecy over the project itself,” the director recalls of the extreme measures the filmmakers took.
They showed up at both Sundance and the Berlinale with bodyguards in tow. “We existed in this moment of, it was like, warfare, and then… Covid hit and we all went home. It wasn’t until we all went home we realised what the toll of this had been on us…we brought in a therapist. For many months, we had weekly therapy sessions as crew.”
Making Welcome To Chechnya may have been gruelling and, at times, terrifying, but New York-based France hasn’t taken a break. “We are working on a major Covid documentary documentation project,” France said.
The new film, backed by HBO, is intended by France to shape up as “the essential documentary on this pandemic.” As in his 2012 documentary about AIDS, How To Survive A Plague, France is looking to “dive” into the subject and to “look at the positive forces which have been mobilising” around the epidemic. The working title is C-19.
