Golden Retrievers And Palomino Ponies To The Rescue: In ‘After The Rain,’ Ukrainian Children Abducted By Russia Find Healing With Help From Animals
https://deadline.com/2024/09/ukrainian-children-deportation-documentary-after-the-rain-director-sarah-mccarthy-interview-1236075574/

By Matthew Carey

EXCLUSIVE: Russian atrocities in Ukraine have been powerfully documented in a range of nonfiction films – among them, 20 Days in Mariupol, Freedom on Fire, The Cranes Call, and the short documentary Bucha 22. But one stunning dimension of Russia’s brutal war of conquest has received comparatively scant attention: the Kremlin scheme to abduct thousands of Ukrainian children and deport them to Russia. A new feature documentary directed and produced by Sarah McCarthy at last puts the focus on that shocking reality.

After the Rain: Putin’s Stolen Children Come Home, executive produced by doc legend Sheila Nevins, held a preview screening last week hosted by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva. McCarthy attended the event with the film’s main protagonist, 15-year-old Veronika Vlasova, who was seized by Russian forces after they captured her village in Eastern Ukraine in the early days of the invasion. Veronika was first sent to a camp in Russia, then to an orphanage where she was held for over a year. Her grandma, Vera, working with the Ukrainian Child Rights Network, managed to win Veronika’s release.

After the Rain centers on a handful of children, including Veronika and Sasha Mezhevoy, repatriated after suffering the nightmare of separation from their families. To help them cope with their traumatic experiences, the kids are offered the chance to spend time at a nature reserve in Estonia. Therapists – human, canine and equine – are there to bring comfort.

“Deep in a forest by the Baltic Sea, a group of Ukrainian families come together to start the healing process with the help of golden retrievers and palomino horses at an animal therapy retreat,” notes a description of the film. “In the safety of the forest, the children’s memories of being illegally deported to Russia and their families’ struggles to rescue them are unraveled with the help of skilled and sensitive counsellors. The joy and humor the children discover during their time in the forest make it easy to forget that their stories are the reason the International Criminal Court recently issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. Nearly 20,000 abducted children remain in Russian institutions.”

Following the screening in Geneva, Veronika, her grandmother, and McCarthy addressed the UN gathering, including committee chair Prof. Ann Skelton. “This is my third film about the Russian state’s systematic use of child-parent separation as a tactic of war,” the filmmaker said in a statement. “Seeing the UN Committee members laugh, cry, and connect with Veronika and Vera [Wednesday night] was a profound experience.”

The whereabouts of most of the children abducted by Russia remain a mystery. Some have been sent as far away as Siberia and elsewhere in Russia’s Far East. “The documentary sheds light on a sensitive and troubling issue: while Russia continues to engage in dialogue with the UN Committee,” a press release about the film states, “it remains evasive about providing specific details on the children’s locations, citing concerns about ‘privacy’ after what they describe as ‘evacuations.’ Critics argue that this is a cover for a darker reality of indoctrination and, in some cases, forced adoption into Russian families.”

According to an investigation by the Yale School of Public Heath’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the Russian camps where Ukrainian children have been taken “appear to serve a range of purposes, including what Yale HRL terms ‘re-education,’ an effort to ostensibly make children more pro-Russia in their personal and political views.” What’s more, the report said, “In some cases, children also undergo military training.”

The Yale HRL investigation also found the program of camps and ‘re-education’ “is centrally coordinated by Russia’s federal government and involves every level of government.”

EP Nevins, who previously ran HBO Documentary Films and later MTV Documentary Films, said of After the Rain, “This is an important film, Americans need to know that there are nearly 20,000 children who have been stolen and are now being brainwashed, we need to feel it in our hearts and know it in our bones and this film can make that happen.”

In an email exchange with Deadline, McCarthy told us about the circumstances in which one of her protagonists was shipped off to Russia.

“Sasha Mezhevoy was only five-years-old when she was evacuated from Mariupol with her father, Yvgeny, and her two siblings. On April 7, 2022, Yvgeny was separated from his children at a military checkpoint in the Bezimenne village, one of the main sites where so-called ‘filtration’ was taking place in the Donetsk region,” McCarthy wrote. “Sasha was told she would see her Dad again in a few hours. But Sasha and her siblings were then illegally deported to an orphanage in Moscow where they were threatened with forcible adoption into a Russian family.”

McCarthy continued, “Sasha’s father was held in a correctional facility for 45 days before being released, he is still unclear as to why they released him. When he discovered his children had been taken to Moscow ‘a bolt of rage shot through me’ (this is how he describes it in the film). He had no money, no home and no way of retrieving his children so he reached out to a volunteer network. This volunteer network helped Yvgeny and Vera return their children.”

The official world premiere date for After the Rain: Putin’s Stolen Children Come Home is expected to be announced in October. McCarthy’s most recent documentary, 2022’s Anastasia, was shortlisted for the Academy Awards.

In a director’s statement, McCarthy writes of After the Rain, “My mother is Ukrainian and this film is a way for me to say thank you for all the meals she cooked, tears she dried and the home she created for me as a child. Her care passes through me and into my child now and the thought of being separated from him is unimaginable.

“Yet we live in a world where 20,000 children are separated from their parents. The children are alive and, in many thousands of cases, the parents are too. The Russian government claims they are working to reunite families but the fact that only 388 children have been released so far suggests otherwise.”

McCarthy continues, “The fates of thousands of illegally deported Ukrainian children include forced adoptions into Russian families, issuing of Russian passports which change the children’s names and dates of birth, indoctrination with Russian propaganda and, for teenage boys, military training with the intention of sending them to war to fight against their Ukrainian compatriots.”

In March of last year, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued its arrest warrant for Pres. Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Putin’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights. It accused them both of alleged responsibility “for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation (under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute). The crimes were allegedly committed in Ukrainian occupied territory at least from 24 February 2022. There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes, (i) for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others… and (ii) for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control, pursuant to superior responsibility…”

The odds of Putin facing justice for this war crime appear slim (former Russian Pres. Dmitry Medvedev, a current member of Russia’s Security Council, threatened to unleash a missile attack on The Hague in response to the arrest warrants). The fate of abducted Ukrainian children remains uncertain as well, but international attention and pressure from the U.N. could prove decisive.

‘After the Rain: Putin’s Stolen Children Come Home’
Courtesy of Denis Sinyakov
McCarthy’s film, about a few children fortunate to make it back home, and their effort to heal at an Estonian retreat, will bring more attention to the cause.

“…[F]rom the outset I wanted to make sure the film would care for audiences in the same way as therapists care for the participants of the retreat,” McCarthy writes in her director’s statement. “I hope the forest, sea and animals will bring the same comfort and release to people seeing the film as they did to our families.

“During filming, it was clear to me how much value there is in spending time in a place where nature, beauty, tenderness and safety can heal the traumas of war. As the children and parents release the war inside themselves into the forest and the sea, I also want to give audiences a chance to relieve some of the pain of being alive in a time of war.”