Fall 2026—Saturday, November 7, 7 p.m.
Ash and Crayons
USA, Ukraine, 2025, 108 minutes, Documentary
Directed and written by: Evgeny Afineevsky.
Ukrainian with English subtitles. Also shown as Children in the Fire.
Description
Ash and Crayons is the heart of Ukrainian Day. It follows Ukrainian children whose childhoods were taken by the war: children who survived missile strikes, lost their parents, or were forcibly deported to Russia. Among them is Roman Oleksiv from Vinnytsia, who was badly burned in a Russian missile strike in July 2022 that killed his mother. After dozens of operations and long rehabilitation, he has returned to school and to his music lessons. Another is Yana Stepanenko, who lost both legs in the missile attack on the railway station in Kramatorsk. Afineevsky filmed many of the children at Unbroken, the national rehabilitation center in Lviv.
The film is not only about suffering. The children still speak of music, school, and dreams, and we watch them rebuild their lives through art, sports, and friendship: running on prosthetic legs, dancing, and performing on stage. Live footage is woven together with animation created by Ukrainian artists. The title is a metaphor for resilience: even from ashes, one can still create. According to the filmmakers, more than 20,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly deported or transferred to Russia since the full-scale invasion began.
Ash and Crayons has been shown at the Vatican, the UK Parliament, the Italian Parliament, the Council of Europe, and the US Congress. It received two awards at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival in 2025 and was honored at the Cinema for Peace gala during the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, where Roman Oleksiv received the Honorary Dove award. Rochester audiences will see the film before its North American theatrical release on November 20, World Children’s Day.
About the director. Evgeny Afineevsky is an Israeli-American filmmaker born in the Soviet Union. He fell in love with filmmaking as a boy, when he washed dishes for a year to earn a Super 8 camera, and at 18 he left the Soviet Union alone for Israel. His documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, about the Revolution of Dignity on the Maidan, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2016. He went on to make Cries from Syria; Francesco, a portrait of Pope Francis; and Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, about the full-scale Russian invasion. Ash and Crayons completes his trilogy about Ukraine. He has documented the country for more than a decade, often working in war zones, always looking for hope amid suffering.