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Tag: David France

All the latest breaking news on documentary maker David France. Browse The THEGAYUK’s complete collection of features and commentary on David France.

  • FILM REVIEW | Welcome to Chechnya – A must see documentary

    FILM REVIEW | Welcome to Chechnya – A must see documentary

    Rating: 5 out of 5.

    David France is quickly becoming one of the best documentary filmmakers of our generation.

    In 2012 he brought us the riveting How to Survive a Plague – about the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the ACT UP activists who fought for their lives. Then came 2017’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, about a well-loved drag queen and gay activist who was found dead off the West Side Piers in Manhattan in 1992. Now he brings us another important documentary for and about the LGBT community – Welcome to Chechnya.

    The film follows David Isteev, who along with the Russian LGBT Network, helps gays and lesbians escape from Chechnya, a country where, in 2017, its government started a gay purge where over 100 men were (allegedly) detained and subject to torture, with many being murdered. This had kicked off because in February 2017 a gay Chechen man had been arrested for drug offences and arresting officers discovered contact information for other gay men on his phone. These men were caught, and they, in turn, turned over more names to the authorities, escalating to a point of crisis. But not only were these gay men subject to arrest and torture, Lesbians were also subject to the same fate.

    In the documentary, David attempts, by all means, to free ‘Anya’ who is seeking help because her uncle has threatened to tell her father, who is a high-ranking Chechyan government official, that she is a Lesbian if she doesn’t have sex with him.

    But the focus of this harrowing documentary is the Moscow safe house where these refugees are taken to temporary accommodation to play the waiting game until a country, any country, can take them in. The focus of the documentary is our hero 30-year-old Grisha. He was arrested and tortured in Chechnya but managed to escape, and left the country. But it left his family vulnerable to the authorities so they, in turn, were smuggled out of the country into a safe house.

    Grisha is reunited with his boyfriend  ‘Bogdan’ in scenes that are emotional and loving – these two men really care and love each other. But Grisha doesn’t want to remain silent and anonymous the rest of his life, he wants to come out publicly to expose the Chechnyan Government for the atrocities they inflicted on not just him but on perhaps what could be hundreds of victims. 

    The film also introduces us to the brave Olga Baranova, who helps the refugees in the safe house with any and all that they need. She is like a mom (she herself has a young son) to the occupants.

    While Anya is successfully smuggled out of the country, she is placed in an apartment and told not to go out – but after three months it appears that she is getting extremely restless and very lonely.

    Meanwhile Grisha and his family are quickly moved to another country after suspicious people knock on their door and threaten to come back the next day. It’s harrowing, and director France was very fortunate to have not only Grisha’s family but the others allow him to film them in, at times, situations that could’ve exposed them. Some airport scenes, filmed undercover, are nail biting.

    All of the subjects in the film have had their faces digitally disguised to protect them. This is such the fear that they have. While Chechnya technically is a federal republic of Russia, it appears to have self and independent rule by Ramzan Kadyrov, who appears to have waged an operation to ‘cleanse the blood’ of LGBT Chechens. He is shown in interviews in the documentary denying there are any LGBT people in his country. But he is shown in a photo with Zelim Bakaev, a Chechen pop-singer, who, in August 2017 disappeared after going back to Chechnya to attend his sister’s wedding. His mother has demanded justice but the government has not even started an investigation. He is presumed dead.

    France’s access to these people is just incredible. Also incredible is that over two years, the Russian LGBT Network has managed to resettle 151 people fleeing Chechnya, many of them coming through the shelter. Welcome to Chechnya is an important documentary not just for our community but for the world to know what exactly takes place in Chechnya to our own people.

    Welcome to Chechnya

    In Russian, Chechen and English with English subtitles
    Not rated
    Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes
    Playing: 8 p.m. June 30 on HBO; also available on HBO Now and HBO Max BBC iPlayer.

  • The story of Marsha P Johnson will be shown on Netflix

    Netflix has announced it will show the documentary of Marsha P Johnson.

    David France’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, is a deeply compelling look at the murder of a transgender legend, known as “the Rosa Parks of the LGBT movement.”

    The powerful, haunting film is France’s follow-up to his Academy Award-nominated How to Survive a Plague. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson is presented by Public Square Films; Joy A. Tomchin and Sara Ramirez (Grey’s Anatomy) served as executive producers; L.A. Teodosio produced.

    The date of release has not yet been released.

  • INTERVIEW | How to survive a plague Peter Staley and David France

    INTERVIEW | How to survive a plague Peter Staley and David France

    We sat down with filmmaker, journalist and director David France and gay rights and HIV activist Peter Staley to talk about their brand new documentary film How To Survive A Plague, which chronicles the astounding progress of the modern gay rights movement and how the gay community dealt with the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s.

    How to survive a plague
    Images: © Donna Binder PR Supplied

    Why was it important to make a documentary like How To Survive A Plague?
    David France: I wanted to go back and do a project about the early years of AIDS, which I had covered as a print journalist and it occurred to me that somehow in our collective recollection of what happened in those years, we kind of condensed everything. We thought of the early years as being sad and then better, but what was lost in that recollection was what it took to get to one place to the other. It took this tremendous epic movement of mostly gay men and lesbians,originating in New York but moving around the globe, to change so much about the way, first of all, what we think about the community in the larger media, and then to transform science and medicine and pharmacological research in a way that people have benefitted across the globe.

    The idea that this was lost, that this movement that Peter and his colleagues had invented out of thin air and out of a desperation, which produced these tremendous victories, seemed to me to be a burden of responsibility to carry forward.

    What do you want How To Survive A Plague to achieve?
    DF: I want people to remember what happened. I want people to recognise that AIDS in the plague years, before there was effective treatment, wasn’t just a period of tragedy. Although it was marked by these intense tragedies. These deaths were just unstoppable and the loss that we’ve all had to carry since then, but it was also a time of great news.

    Before HIV or AIDS activism it gave (gay) people, at least in the United States, perhaps more than in the UK, a real role in public life.

    We were isolated. We were living in these geographical ghettos. We were hated – officially and culturally and rejected by everybody across the board including our families.

    To go from there in 1981 when AIDS first hit till 1996 when the drugs were finally discovered, promulgated and brought out; and HIV was survivable, that was also this period of amazing cultural integration and this revolution of the way we exist in society.

    Peter Staley: I hope it inspires young gay men and lesbians, and really shows them their history and how we got to this point. It shows them the power of our community.

    It shows gay people at their best. In one of the worst moments we ever faced we rose above it. We took care of each other. It was extraordinary and beautiful. At the same time, it’s something very important, for my generation, to help us remember and memorialise what we went through and to remember the friends that we lost.

    A lot of us didn’t process those years, and this film and others that have come after it, and looking back, is something we need to go through. We need to honour the sacrifice of those that we lost and the extraordinary work they did that allows all of us to live happy long lives these days.

    Is the gay community as politically charged today as it was in the 80s and 90s?
    PS: Yes it is charged up. AIDS forced us out of the closet. Either we laid down and died and got wiped out or we had to stand up and come out of the closet and fight back.

    Once we did that, we realised that as a community we had immense power and this film just shows it beautifully.We had this innate power as a community and that launched the modern gay rights movement. Especially in the States with
    gays in the military first and nobody ever thought we’d have close to 20 states now in the US with gay marriage.
    Gay marriage is now happening in the UK and across Europe and countries in South America. This is just something I would never have dreamed of.

    There are massive amounts of activism around, but I wish there was a little bit of it to be brought back to finish
    the work on AIDS. I speak out about that a lot these days because obviously, the crisis is not over. It’s liveable but the virus is still infecting way too many gay men and we need to fight that. We need to slowly wind down this epidemic. We have the tools to do it.

    With the sharp increase of new HIV infections, particularly amongst young gay men, how does that make you feel, when you see that happening?
    PS: It’s frustrating, but I don’t feel anger towards younger gay men who are not responding to HIV like my generation responded to it because it was two very different times. My generation changed its behaviours and fought against HIV / AIDS.

    It became the issue in the gay rights movement because all my friends were dying in front of me. In the absence of that death, which only happened because of the amazing success of the activism we did, you have a very different challenge, you have apathy.

    There’s a lack of fear and without that fear, which is an incredible motivator for behaviour change and activism, it’s a very different battle.

    So I’m not casting blame, I think if I was a 22-year-old HIV-negative man now I’d be pretty oblivious myself. I think it’s human nature. We just have to accept that and work around it and use social media and tell the real story about how living with HIV still is something that nobody should want to face a life of.

    It’s still quite challenging. You have to take the medication for the rest of your life. You have to remain anally compulsively engaged in the healthcare system in order to not screw that up because, if you mess up on your meds you will eventually get sick. There are still people with HIV who die. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone and we need to give the real picture.

    DF: We have to keep on talking about it. That’s what we’re not doing. People are making decisions about their own
    lives in a total vacuum thinking, ‘So I’ll take a pill a day’ and if we were talking about it collectively as a community we might be up to convey the information that Peter is talking about. That these pills are really tough pills. It might give you a near normal lifespan but it’s not going to give you, necessarily, a near normal life. We don’t know what people are going to be like 50 years out on this medication.

    PS: Plus the stigma is horrible, and you’re going to face a life of that stigma: Dating, finding a boyfriend or a future husband, you’ll find a massive challenge. It is a massive challenge for people who are HIV and that’s horrible but that’s the reality that we’re faced with these days.

    Interview by Jake Hook and Greg Mitchell

    This interview was taken from Issue 1 of THEGAYUK (2014) Subscribe for FREE and never miss another issue.

    How To Survive A Plague is available to watch and buy from AMAZON PRIME | AMAZON

  • FILM REVIEW | How To Survive A Plague

    ★★★★★ | How To Survive A Plague

    “Never has so much been owed by so many to so few.” These are the words of Sir Winston Churchill, referring to the efforts of the Royal Air Force pilots fighting the Battle of Britain in 1940, but they are also the words that sprang into my mind after watching David France’s brilliant documentary How To Survive A Plague.

    It tells the story of a small group of men and women, most of them HIV positive, who battled against government indifference and departmental incompetence, to save their own lives. In so doing they helped save the lives of 6.000,000.

    This is a great piece of film-making that documents the courage and determination of these people in the face of appalling obstacles from a government that couldn’t give a damn. The overriding message from the Reagan, and then the Bush administration, was that gay people didn’t matter, that AIDS was a result of bad lifestyle choices, and that we deserved it.

    Using archive footage, we are given stark reminders of the shock tactics they used to bring their plight to the attention of the world, culminating in the display of the 8,288 panels of the AIDS quilt in 1988, and the march on the White House, when relatives and lovers of the dead scattered the ashes of their loved ones onto the White House lawn. These were the days when funeral parlours refused the bodies of people who had died of AIDS, when hospital security guards barred AIDS patients from entering emergency wards.

    Dark times indeed, chillingly brought to life again in the newsreel footage we see in this movie. But anger alone was not going to be enough to win the battle. We learn how these activists became scientists, taking on an intense study of virology, immunology, pharmacology and cellular biology in an attempt to help direct the global research effort.

    Sadly, not all of the activists lived long enough to see the fruits of their labour; to see AIDS (or HIV) become a manageable condition, as it is today. Of those that did, the charismatic Peter Staley emerges as the undoubted star. Given just 18 months to live at the age of 26, he is galvanised into fighting for his life, and there is no doubt that his eloquence (not to mention his youthful good looks) helped spearhead the campaign.

    David France tells this story clearly and unflinchingly, putting us right at the heart of the battle, the occasional heartbreak at failure and the euphoria surrounding success; even the internal rifts and skirmishes. Gripping, moving, inspiring, at times emotionally draining, it is a story that demands to be told. Required viewing for every gay man, particularly those under the age of 30, I recommend it absolutely. We owe our lives to these people. Surely the rest of us can spare them 110 minutes of our time.

     

    Available to buy / view on: Amazon | Amazon Prime |