“Tell me how critical the situation is and why you assume your father is a threat.”.” The response comes via speakerphone. A woman says her uncle has discovered she is gay. If he tells her father, a government official in the southern Russian republic where gay people are systematically tortured, he might murder her. She isn’t sure how to flee without getting caught, hence the reason she’s seeking counsel from David Isteev, the person who initiated the call.
“Before I started making documentary films, I was a print journalist, and I have a great deal of foreign reporting experience in my past,” France said.
The director assumed he’d use traditional visual-effects methods to anonymize everyone, namely rotoscoping, an animation technique that turns live-action material into realistic cartoons. But upon applying the rotoscoping, France discovered it wasn’t viable. “It either completely erased the humanity of the people whose stories I was telling, or it rendered them, unexpectedly, even more recognizable,” he said. “It kind of made them into caricatures of themselves.
Laney and a small team spent nine months experimenting with ways to fashion a technology that camouflaged faces but still captured the real person’s expressions. The intent was for audiences to feel survivors’ every emotion as they escape Chechnya and transition to a new life, which traditional identity-obscuring procedures — think blacked-out faces and improbable voice disguises — wouldn’t allow for. The VFX producers landed on an automated version of what stunt doubles do on big movies.