'Welcome to Chechnya' Trailer Highlights Hidden Gay Atrocities

Welcome to Chechnya, the third film from gay documentarian David France, will debut June 30 on HBO.

The movie's trailer highlights the furtive escape efforts of LGBTQ+ people from Chechnya, a semi-autonomous Russian region. Chechen officials in recent years targeted LGBTQ+ people, kidnapping, imprisoning, torturing, and even killing some.

France -- who most recently made 2017's The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson and was Oscar-nominated for his 2012 film How to Survive a Plague -- highlights the state-sanctioned terror in his latest film and features an infamous clip from former Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov where he claims gay people don't exist in Chechnya.

Welcome to Chechnya was lauded at film festivals last year, reports IndieWire. Not only does the film intimately capture the life-or-death efforts to save gay people, it employs a novel face-swapping technology that adds anonymous facial features to victims who cannot display their identity on camera.

Watch the trailer below.