At the Odesa International Film Festival, which is being held in Kyiv in 2025, director Evgeny Afineevsky premiered his film Children in Fire. After the screening, the documentary filmmaker said the new work focuses on Ukrainian children who suffered injuries, deportation, pressure, and attempts at forced re-education by Russia.
According to the director, the film is built around eight stories. Its protagonists include Yana Stepanenko, who lost both legs after the strike on the railway station in Kramatorsk, and Bohdan Yermokhin, who was taken out of Ukraine, threatened with a psychiatric hospital, pushed toward service in the Russian army, and placed under guardianship without his consent. Afineevsky said he chose such testimonies because they show the falsehood of Russian claims that children stayed in Russia “voluntarily.”
“Lvova-Belova said the child wanted to stay in Russia, but he clearly said that was not true and tried to escape twice,” Afineevsky said, explaining why he included Yermokhin’s story.
The director said he used a combination of documentary footage and animation to convey what the children endured without turning the film into a sequence of graphic scenes of violence. In his view, Western audiences often distance themselves from excessively brutal imagery, so it is important to preserve emotional force while making the story understandable to viewers with little knowledge of the Ukrainian context.
Afineevsky added that he focuses primarily on ordinary people rather than politicians in order to build a connection between the people on screen and international audiences. He also said that a screening of Children in Fire in the UK Parliament later contributed to discussion of new sanctions against Russia.