Out This Week: Welcome to Chechnya

With searing urgency, the edge-of-your-seat documentary Welcome to Chechnya shadows a group of activists who risk unimaginable peril to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ purge raging in the repressive and closed Russian republic.

 

Since 2017, Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has waged a depraved operation to “cleanse the blood” of LGBTQ Chechens, overseeing a campaign to detain, and execute them. Operating without the sanction of the Kremlin, activists take matters into their own hands.

 

In this riveting new film, acclaimed director David France (the same filmmaker behind How to Survive a Plague and The Death of Marsha P. Johnson – also both must-sees) uses a remarkable hands-on approach to expose this atrocity and tell the story of an extraordinary group of people literally putting their lives on the line to confront evil.

 

Originally broadcast on HBO, Welcome to Chechnya is available on DVD starting this week. Watch the trailer below and click here to order your copy.

 

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