Eric Reguly
February 15, 2025
The Globe and Mail
A Hollywood film director and members of Toronto’s prominent Tory family have found an apt setting for the opening of their film about the children physically and mentally damaged in the war in Ukraine: the Munich Security Conference.
Ukraine, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign to end the conflict, now entering its fourth year, are the centre of attention at the conference, which began Friday and runs through Sunday. Former Toronto mayor John Tory and his brother, Michael Tory, say they hope the film, Children in the Fire, will drive home the point to world leaders that kids are often the forgotten victims of war. “The film opening in this key forum gives me a sense of relief that their story is getting out,” Michael Tory, co-founder of the investment advisory firm Ondra LLP in London, said in an interview Friday. “This is about evil being inflicted on children.”
John Tory said the film is “both heartwarming, in that it shows the children’s resilience, and heartbreaking.”
Children in the Fire was directed by Evgeny Afineevsky, a friend of John and Michael and their sister, Jennifer Tory, who was chair of the Toronto International Film Festival until 2021. The film’s private screening at the Astor Film Lounge Im Arri in Munich will be attended only by conference delegates and their guests. A public debut, probably at a film festival and possibly in Canada, will happen some time later this year.
The host of the opening will be Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who is chairman emeritus of the House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee. He has been outspoken in condemning Russia for its abduction, he says, of more than 200,000 Ukrainian children, some of whom were sent to Russian indoctrination camps. (The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in 2023 for Russian President Vladimir Putin “for the war crime of unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children.)
Mr. Afineevsky’s film was financed largely by the Tory siblings and two of their friends, whom the Torys would not identify. They also would not disclose the amount they contributed to the production, though feature-length documentaries are often costly. This film would be all the more expensive because it includes animation, done in a Ukrainian studio, that depicts the attacks that injured the featured children.
The director told The Globe that: “Children in the Fire is not a diary of horror. The idea of the movie is to show how strong and resilient these children are. Their stories belong to every child who is suffering from wars around the world.”
Some of the film centres on the remarkable story of Yana Stepanenko, now a young teenager, who was a victim of a Russian missile attack on the Kramatorsk train station in Ukraine’s far east, on April 8, 2022. The strike, which was widely condemned as a war crime, killed 63 civilians, including nine children, and wounded 150 others.
Yana lost her lower legs and has spent three years trying to repair her life, both physically and mentally, with the guidance of her mother, Natalia Stepanenko, who lost a leg in the same attack. “I’m home most of the time,” Yana told The Globe and Mail in an interview at a rehabilitation clinic in Lviv, Ukraine, in late 2023. “I am doing a lot of painting and I do not have a lot of friends now. Sometimes the bad memories come but I want to forget them forever. Before I lost my legs, I wanted to become a teacher. I do not have a new dream now.”
Today, Yana walks well on her protheses and uses sports-blade versions to run. Last year, she ran part of the Boston Marathon. She is now in Japan preparing for the Tokyo Marathon in March.
Mr. Afineevsky, 52, was born to a Russian-Jewish family in Kazan, the fifth-biggest city of Russia, during the Soviet era. In the early 1990s, he became a citizen of Israel, where he produced or co-produced dozens of musicals and several plays and TV series. In 1999, he moved to Los Angeles.
His international break came in 2015, when his documentary, Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. At TIFF the same year, it won the People’s Choice Award for best documentary. In 2016, it was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature and for a Primetime Emmy Award in a similar category.
His second Ukraine film, Freedom on Fire, about the early stages of Russia’s invasion, made its world debut in 2022 at the Venice festival. It was through this film that he connected with the Tory family.
Jennifer Tory was instrumental in bringing Freedom on Fire to Human Rights Watch’s Canada Film Festival in Toronto, where the 114-minute documentary had its Canadian premiere at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in 2023. At the screening, Mr. Afineevsky met Michael Tory, who helped him secure the film’s showing at London’s Royal Society of Arts later that year. It played at TIFF and there was also a showing at the Vatican, which was attended by Pope Francis, who Mr. Afineevsky counts as a close friend. By then, Michael Tory and Mr. Afineevsky had become friends and partners in the still secret Children in the Fire project. The Tory brothers visited Ukraine to see for themselves the consequences of the war.
Michael Tory says proceeds from Children in the Fire will be used to fund children’s charities in Ukraine, one of which will be Gen.Ukrainian. Oksana Lebedeva, a Ukrainian former marketing and media executive who opened the children’s rehab centre in 2022, said she is overwhelmed by children seeking her three-week recovery program. They are war victims who lost one or both parents or were abducted by Russia and later returned. “Those children suffered,” she said in an interview. “When they arrived with us, they did not play, they did not trust each other, avoided
eye contact and did not talk. We were able to help them but many will have problems for decades because they were traumatized.”
Eric Reguly is the European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail and is based in Rome. Since 2007, when he moved to Europe, Eric has spent about half of his time covering economic, financial and environmental stories, ranging from the euro zone crisis and the bank bailouts to the rise and fall of Russia’s oligarchs and several UN climate summits. Since late 2022, he has been one of The Globe and Mail reporters covering the Ukraine war. In Europe, he is also a regular guest on Canadian and American radio and TV programs, including CBC, CTV and San Francisco’s KALW, and gives speeches about business issues. Eric joined The Globe and Mail in late 1997. He has an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in English and French Literature and a Masters in Journalism from the University of Western Ontario.