Fleapit revisited:Welcome to Chechnya.

"If they don't kill you, you're a winner" - David Isteev, Crisis Response Coordinator for the Russian LGBT Network.

David France's Welcome to Chechnya, shown on BBC4 as part of their Storyville strand is a quietly angry piece of film making that shows how homosexuality in the Chechen region of Russia, and wider in that country, has become so demonised that those who partake of it, or those who are suspected of partaking in it, are being rounded up and forced into mass detention camps, tortured (on the orders of the Chechen leader Ramzon Kadyrov), maimed, and even killed. Often by members of their own families. So deeply ingrained is the societal shame that Kadyrov, wholly endorsed by Putin, has brought on gay people.

The film begins with a gay woman, Anya (names have been changed to protect those whose lives are still in danger and faces have been digitally disguised in a way that you hardly even notice), making a phone call to the Russian LGBT Network in which she reveals that her uncle has discovered her homosexuality and is threatening to tell her father unless she has sex with him. The father, a high ranking member of the Chechen government, will certainly kill her if he finds out.

Sadly, it's not a unique tale in Chechnya. A republic of the North Caucasus of the Russian Federation in which it is said that to be gay is a shame so strong only blood can wash it away. We see people fleeing for their lives and, in video footage intercepted by LGBT activists, we see angry mobs violently assaulting gay people and, like under the regimes of Hitler and Stalin - one commentator points out, getting away with it.

There's a suicide attempt in the shelter. A slashed wrist. We get a long close look at the aftermath and the attempts to keep the man alive. It's not pretty. Even more disturbing is the grainy video footage that shows a family member of a lesbian woman drag her out into the road before attempting to crush her head under a boulder. Thankfully the camera cuts away before we witness the full horror but it chills you to the bone. It is absolutely horrendous.

This is what life is like for gay people in Chechnya. Not because Chechens are more or less homophobic than people elsewhere in Russia or other countries. But because that is what the Chechen leader Kadyrov wants life to be like for gay people in Chechnya. Enough of his citizens are compliant or have been radicalised to do his dirty work for him and Putin not only likes Kadyrov but actually put him into his current presidential position back in 2007.

A Kremlin backed 'strongman', Kadyrov is allowed to make his own rules for as long as he remains vocally supportive of Putin. Which he does. Putin often returns the compliments. Kadyrov promotes the idea that there are no gay people in Chechnya (and jokes about sending them to Canada), he calls them "devils" and "subhuman" and when stories emerge of the torture they've undergone at the hands of his functionaries he accuses them of "slander". Of course, he incites God/Allah in his condemning of homosexuality.

Of course, it's not hard to see how, with a man like Kadyrov in charge, gay witch hunts prosper. We hear stories of parents urged to kill their gay children and siblings urged to slaughter their gay brothers and sisters and we learn about Zalim Bakaev, a popular Chechen pop singer of X Factor style power ballads. Bakaev was suspected of being gay and in August 2017 in Grozny, the Chechen capital, he disappeared.

Nearly three years later he's still missing but many believe he has been killed as part of a systematic purge of gay men (and women) in Chechnya. Via tense scenes at airports and footage of bored youngsters sheltering in safe houses in fear of their lives at just the age they should be out enjoying that life, David France tells a bleak, slow moving, devoid of any stentorian narrator's voice, tale of how the Chechen government are implicit not just in the torture and execution of gay people but in the climate of fear that leads to nothing being done about it.

Welcome to Chechnya's full of understated music and full of scenes of people waiting in kitchens, taxis, and airport terminals. Many of the interviews are carried out over WhatsApp voice calls and the most enlightening contributions come from David Isteev himself who, as mentioned at the start of this piece, works as the Crisis Response Coordinator at the Russian LGBT Network.

Isteev, Olga Baranova and their colleagues run a secret shelter in Moscow and help people whose lives are in danger to escape, first, Chechnya and then Russia. Those staying in the shelter are fully aware that they can be killed at any time (evidenced by a story of someone murdered while taking out their bins). For the most part people stay at the shelter for about two weeks before a safe country can be found for them. We meet one couple who are escaping to Canada and others move to undisclosed addresses in Europe.

Addresses that remain undisclosed because, as demonstrated with Alexander Litvinenko and the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury, Putin's Russia can kill on foreign soil with complete impunity. One of the guys who's starting a new life, in a brief monologue to the camera, realises that once he's crossed the ocean he will never again hear the sound of a single family member's voice.

That's what it's like to be gay in Chechnya. To stay there you risk your life, to leave you lose your family. Nothing seems likely to change until a criminal complaint is filed and even then it seems unlikely to be upheld, Russian courts being notoriously authoritarian and corrupt. Complaints had not been filed about forced imprisonment, torture, and extrajudicial killings because the fear of retribution was so real and so lethal that nobody dared risk registering one.

Maxim Lapunov, eventually, with the support of Isteev, takes his case, he was forced into a car and held for twelve days under the constant threat of immediate death, to the Russian court. He speaks bravely and openly about his experiences and how when he was released he'd been beaten so badly by the police that he could hardly crawl let alone walk.

The Russian authorities, predictably and depressingly, refused to investigate his case and recent intercepted videos show gay people being attacked in the nearby republic of North Ossetia-Alania and Dagestan. The virus of hatred and violence is spreading out across the Caucusus and into wider Russia. A country that already has an astonishingly low tolerance for LGBT lifestyles and a Putin inspired predisposition towards violent 'justice'.

While France's film may have lacked the lachrymose qualities I seem to find (or wallow) in in so many other movies and television shows, it's dispassionate nature made for a very powerful and articulate piece of film making that made it very clear that these injustices, these crimes against humanity, were very real, very lethal, very numerous and very much still ongoing.

Welcome to Chechnya made it absolutely apparent that Kadyrov, and above him Putin, were not just negligently refusing to investigate these crimes but are in fact the direct perpetrators of them. For now, Isteev's message - "if they don't kill you, you're a winner" - is the most positive message you can take away from this film but this story needs, it demands, a more positive coda and whilst Kadyrov and Putin remain in power and remain impervious to justice or even basic morality that's still yet to come. With Putin putting plans in place to stay in power until 2036 that may never arrive.