Digital Disguise in "Welcome to Chechnya"

Welcome to Chechnya’s Face Veil Is a Game Changer in Identity Protection

David France's Welcome to Chechnya shadows an underground network of LGBTQ activists who help Chechens escape the anti-gay pogrom underway in this Russian republic. The peril is underscored by a text that appears at the film's start: "For their safety, people fleeing for their lives have been digitally disguised."

"He's going to kill me for sure," a young lesbian renamed "Anya" says about her father, a Chechen government official. This isn't just teenage hyperbole. Since 2017, the government has been aggressively purging lesbians and gays, imprisoning and torturing them and pressuring families to carry out honor killings. Anya is desperate because her uncle is threatening to out her to her father, unless she agrees to have sex.

France, an investigative journalist and director of the Oscar-nominated How To Survive a Plague, got access to people like Anya with the promise that their identity would be fully masked—unrecognizable even to their mothers—though, at the time, he had no idea how. He knew what he didn't want: "90 minutes of blurs and boxes and black bars and dark shadows." France hoped to find a technique that would protect his subjects while making their emotions plain to see. "I wanted the audience to feel what it was like to go through this medieval experience today," he says.

France's quest ultimately led to the development of a new AI tool: a face-doubling program that uses deep machine learning to replace the subject's face with an entirely new one that faithfully mirrors every expression. …

Published June 30, 2020 in IDA’s Documentary magazine.