AFTER THE RAIN: PUTIN’S STOLEN CHILDREN COME HOME – Review by April Neale
There are documentaries that inform, and there are documentaries that create a lasting impression. After the Rain belongs to the latter. It is more than a film. It is a silent ache.
Director Sarah McCarthy makes a deliberate, and in many ways devastating, choice. She refuses spectacles. There are no explosions, no battlefield footage, no graphic depictions of war. Instead, she gives us the calm aftermath. The stolen childhoods and fractured identities. The unbearable question of what remains after a child has been taken, renamed, and nearly erased. Trauma is not only carried by those who endure it. It reverberates outward. it isn’t just a documentary. After the Rain is a quiet act of resistance.