A Worm in the Heart, an award-winning documentary by Irish director Paul Rice about the true and raw experiences of queer people living in Russia, is now available to stream across multiple platforms.

Originally hitting the big screen back in 2020, the film has accrued several awards at various festivals and received its Irish premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival in 2021.

“A Worm in the Heart is all about the really brave stories of the LGBT+ community across Russia,” Rice expressed in an interview with GCN. “The film follows myself and my partner, Liam, as we went undercover and travelled across all of Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. We stopped off in cities that were thousands of kilometres apart to meet with these LGBT+ people who really risked everything to meet with us.”

The documentary features a multitude of queer folks who share their true feelings, experiences and opinions on what it’s like to live in the heavily homophobic environment of Russia. Rice reflected on the experience of meeting, filming and interviewing these brave people, saying, “It was their lives, they were risking everything, you could see it in their faces, you could see the weight that they were carrying around, you could see how worried they were just initially meeting us like ‘are you who you say you are?’”

Rice wants viewers to take one important thing away from watching their documentary: “People aren’t propaganda. It doesn’t matter if they’re LGBT+, but it doesn’t matter if they’re an asylum seeker, or if they’re an immigrant, or any kind of minority group. It’s so easy to look at a group that you’re not part of, that you don’t understand, and think that they’re dangerous, or think that they’re scary, or think that they’re trying to undermine the country. Because that’s literally what the official line in Russia is, and Russian people, by and large, do think that.”

A Worm in the Heart is now available to stream on platforms such as Amazon, Google Play, Apple+ and Vimeo.