In early 2017, reports began to emerge out of Chechnya that authorities were detaining gay men and subjecting them to torture and humiliation.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov immediately repudiated the claims (he maintains that there are no LGBTQ individuals in Chechnya), but the documentary evidence of abuse is impossible to deny.
In response to the anti-gay purges, a group of queer activists in Russia began an underground operation to evacuate queer Chechens and place them in safe houses in Moscow until they could flee the country.
Upon hearing about this movement, journalist and filmmaker David France (an Oscar nominee for 2012's How to Survive a Plague) flew to Russia to embed himself with the activists, capturing their life-threatening.