A House Made Of Splinters, the heartbreaking Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont and produced by Monica Hellström, has left an inspiring legacy. The film led directly to the formation of the Ukrainian charitable foundation, Voices Of Children, an outfit which now has a burgeoning international reputation.
Olena (‘Lena’) Rozvadovska, a children’s rights advocate, was the production co-ordinator and general fixer on the documentary (which is set in a shelter in eastern Ukraine for children temporarily removed from their parents). Through the film, she met journalist, Azad Safarov.
“We started to push Lena [saying] ‘let’s launch something big,’” Safarov remembers how he and director Wilmont persuaded Rozvadovska to set up Voices Of Children in 2019. By then, she had already been working in war-torn eastern Ukraine for five years, providing humanitarian assistance for families and trying to help and rehabilitate injured and emotionally scarred children. After “months of discussion,” Lena agreed to establish the new organisation. “She said, ‘Azad, if you join me, then I will launch it. We became co-founders.”
Rozvadovska and Safarov are speaking to Business Doc Europe on a Zoom connection from Ukraine. A year after the full-scale invasion by Russia, they acknowledge that their work has been exhausting and emotionally draining – but their NGO is thriving. Supported by everybody from Madonna to Oprah Winfrey, it now has a team of 60 psychologists who help kids across the country deal with the trauma of war. The charity gives practical assistance, evacuating families when necessary and providing food and clothing. Refugees traumatised by the war can access online counselling from abroad.
‘Me personally, I developed some kind of resilience because of constantly working on this topic,” Rozvadovska explains how she has learned to cope with the demands of work which exposes her to the suffering of the children. “Also, we don’t have any other choice to fight – and everybody is fighting for their own frontline. This [Voices Of Children] is our frontline.”
“Maybe on the first day of the war, 24th February, I might have had a panic attack – but it was only for the first day,” Safarov says of his experiences at the start of the Russian invasion. He met with Rozvadovska immediately after the invasion and they agreed “to put aside all our personal lives, our problems” so they could dedicate themselves to Voices Of Children. The work, he adds, provides him with a sense of purpose and keeps despair at bay.
Over the last year, the charity has kept on going. The psychologists may now hold their sessions with kids in basements and under the constant threat of Russian shelling but their work has become more important now than ever.
“It’s not only us. It is all Ukrainians…there are two choices. Give up…be depressed and wait for the war to end – or just do something,” Safarov adds.
Rozvadovska first began working in the field of child protection after the “revolution of dignity” in 2014, Now, the job of protecting children is “on a dramatically bigger scale.”
Following the February 24 invasion, she was involved in the evacuation of the children from the shelter featured in A House Made Of Splinters. “For sure, it was the first decision of the local administration to evacuate the children.”
It was a tough trip for the kids. They were taken by train to Lviv in the west of Ukraine. “They were stopping in the fields for hours because there were shells,” Rozvadovska says of a journey which lasted almost three days.
Eventually, some of the kids were taken to European countries. The charity stayed in contact with them throughout.
Kolya, one of the main characters in the film, ended up being adopted by a man who had seen the documentary at an early screening. “He [the man] came to our office in Kyiv and he said ‘thanks to the film, I have found my second son.’ Happily, now, Kolya has a foster family.”
Other stories are not so happy. As the charity’s website details, over 450 children have been killed since the start of the war. Many more have been injured. While over 3 million have gone abroad with their parents, 721,000 have been forcibly deported to Russia.
“This is the most tough part, this unreal and inhuman deportation,” Lena says of the kids plucked from their families in the occupied territories of Ukraine. She and Safarov have grim stories of parents on very low incomes making epic journeys by bus into Russia in an attempt to get their sons and daughters back.
After the invasion, the Voices Of Children website was targeted by hackers trying to get hold of some of the donations. IT specialists were able to clear up the problem quickly.
“There is no one answer,” Safarov says of where the support is coming from. Some cash has been raised by screenings of A House Made Of Splinters and of Wilmont’s earlier film, The Distant Barking Of Dogs (2017). It has helped that the organisation’s work is now covered by major media outlets like Sky News, CNN and ABC, and that activists within Ukraine are posting stories on their social medias channels. “Madonna collected money for us. Oprah Winfrey collected money for us and asked people to help us.”
Safarov points out that there has been a change of mindset regarding children’s mental health since the invasion. Previously, many Ukrainians hadn’t taken psychological counselling for kids seriously. If such services were offered, parents might become offended as if the implication was that their children were somehow mentally unstable. “They’d say ‘come on, she’s not psycho!’ They didn’t understand it.” Now, though, it’s accepted by almost everybody that children in a war-torn country will benefit from psychological support.
Celebrities have made big donations but ordinary Ukrainians have also helped where they can, sending what they can. So have benefactors from “Argentina to Japan, people from all over the world,” as Rozvadovska puts it.
Now, the Oscar nomination is bringing yet more attention to Voices Of Children, a charitable foundation whose services, sadly, are now more in demand than ever.
A House Made Of Splinters was made through Danish production company Final Cut For Real. International sales are handled by Cinephil.
