Welcome to Chechnya

This was a very disturbing documentary.

I've seen people escaping from North Korea, Central America, all done to death. I knew 5 minutes in that I just didn't care enough to give it my time.

I was looking forward to this. Few places in the world have been so vocal about their hatred and violence against gays. While this film shows some absolutely shocking evidence of that, it ultimately fails as a documentary to tell a compelling, informative story. It's very slow and boring and lacks focus and cohesion. The whole film is just a compilation of random, disorganized, mostly uninteresting, poorly filmed, repetitive conversations amongst mostly two dimensional subjects. Poor filmmaking.

I've been interested in Chechnya a lot recently. I was looking for a documentary about the area and this was the top result. While I wanted more of a historical look at the republic, this gave some of the history along with the horrific modern torture and harassment of gay people within the republic. The director tells a very human story in the documentary. The main subject of this film talks about loving the people of Chechnya but how those people have been bent by the leadership into zealots.