Since early 2017, the Chechen Republic has been carrying out a violent purge of its LGBTQ citizens, even as its leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, maintains that there are no gay Chechens. His government condones this form of ethnic cleansing, and it is happening right now.

David France, the filmmaker behind the documentaries How to Survive a Plague and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, traveled to Chechnya in 2017 after reading of the government’s campaign to imprison, torture, and lynch its LGBTQ population. France and his small crew went incognito pretending to be tourists, equipped with only consumer camcorders, cell phone cameras, and GoPros, to covertly film several LGBTQ subjects who were trying to flee Chechnya to safety, as well as the activists helping them find safe passage.

The film follows David Isteev from the Russian LGBT Network and Olga Baranova from the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives. Most of the film takes place in one of their safe houses, where at any given time about a half dozen runaways live discreetly together. All of them must take on a new name when living in the house, so if captured they cannot divulge the actual identities of the others. Despite not learning each other’s names, and all coming from vastly different backgrounds, the housemates form makeshift families as they await to set off for other countries, never to see each other again. France’s footage captures the camaraderie formed in such a short time as these disparate individuals come together to fight the same fight against their home country that now wants them either silenced or dead.

The main refugees France follows are “Anya” and “Grisha.” Anya, the daughter of a high-ranking government official, is being blackmailed by her uncle (if Anya will not have sex with her uncle, he will out her as a lesbian to her father). Isteev and Baranova undertook an especially covert operation to keep her safe because the government was actively pursuing her after she went missing. As it turns out, women are the hardest to hide because they are the most sought after.

Grisha, the other main subject, was held captive and tortured for 12 days in a secret prison alongside dozens of other gay men. Grisha was let go, he believes, because he is not Chechen but Russian and was only in the country for work. Feeling the Chechen authorities would come back for him, Grisha, several members of his family, and his boyfriend, “Bogdan,” fled to an undisclosed European country with the help of Isteev and Baranova. Upon reaching safety, Grisha has revealed his true identity to the media and has spoken out against the Chechen government.

What may make this one of the most powerful documentaries of its kind is how the filmmakers were able to use face-disguising technology that has never been used in documentary film before. Using artificial intelligence and deep machine learning, the digital effects company 300 Ninjas, Inc. took the facial and vocal performances of several volunteer LGBTQ activists, mostly from New York City, and digitally inserted them over the film’s subjects to ensure their anonymity. It’s just like deepfake, but put to a humanitarian use.

France also utilizes video recordings of assaults on LGBTQ people, some of which were uploaded to the internet by groups of Chechen men who performed the assaults. These too were digitally altered to maintain the anonymity of the victims. While these are brutal and may be hard for some viewers to watch, they effectively convey how the LGBTQ community is being hunted down in Chechnya. Seemingly no place is safe for them during this persecution that has now been going on for three years.

Welcome to Chechnya continues France’s mission to make powerfully relevant documentaries with a purpose of lighting the activist fire in their viewers. After covering the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s and the near-genocide level of murders of trans women of color in the United States, this is France’s first film to be fully immersed in the present moment. Debuting during Pride Month as well as the recent upswell of protests across the world, this documentary about a current atrocity against human rights could not be arriving at a better time. Watch and get angry.