After the Rain: Putin’s Stolen Children Come Home

Putin uses Russia’s youth as cannon fodder, so it should hardly surprise anyone that he treats Ukrainian children as pawns and spoils of war. Over 200,000 Ukrainian juveniles have been abducted into Russia. So far, only a fraction have been recovered. Not shockingly, those who return suffer from considerable trauma. Understanding the need for counseling, as well as a break from the constant Russian shelling, a lake-front animal therapy clinic in Latvia offers healing retreats to rescued Ukrainian children and a parent-guardian. There will be no panaceas, but at least they get a break from the war and start the healing process, as Sarah McCarthy documents in After the Rain: Putin’s Stolen Children Come Home, which starts streaming today on IndiePix Unlimited.

Putin and his Wagner lackeys probably wouldn’t give a working-class Ukrainian fellow like Yvgeny a second look. Likewise, they would likely scoff at a simple Grandma like Vera. Yet, they both ventured into Russia to bring home his daughter Sasha (and Sasha’s siblings) and her daughter Veronika. It was especially dangerous for Yvgeny, because he had been held for over a month in a civilian prison camp, but it was a choice most parents surely understand.

Few abducted children could simply shrug off the experience. That is especially true for Sasha and Veronika, so they have been invited to the retreat. There will be swimming and hiking, but the real attractions are the therapy horses and the therapy dogs. The latter are pretty darn charming and eternally patient.

Nobody thinks the kids will be all better by the time they leave (except maybe regular viewers of daytime talk shows). However, the staff seems to make some progress. They have been through these sorts of sessions before, yet they seem surprised by how deeply their latest cases affect them on an emotional level.

After the Rain focuses on the retreat’s therapeutic care rather than the original crimes. Nevertheless, it pretty well solidifies McCarthy’s standing as the leading documenter of Putin’s War on Children. Previously, she made the short doc Anastasia, which followed a former Russian prisoner-of-conscience, as she scatters the ashes of her severely disabled daughter, who died in an institution while her mother was under strict house arrest. McCarthy also exposed the plight of Russian “Pipeline Babies,” whose approved American adoptions were cancelled by Putin as a reprisal for passage of the Magnitsky Sanctions in The Dark Matter of Love. Taken together, McCarthy’s three films establish an absolute contemptible pattern of behavior.

It also gives the audience an inkling of how much psyhcological damage from Putin’s war crimes will compound for children over the coming years and decades, even if his illegal war halts tomorrow. McCarthy largely leaves such points for viewers to surmise. Instead, she allows the audience to intimately observe the children, their parental figures, and the counselors, as they start fitting their emotional pieces back together. Clearly, sensitivity and restraint were top priorities for McCarthy and her team. Recommended for its honesty and compassion, After the Rain: Putin’s Stolen Children Come Home is now available on IndiePix Unlimited.