Azad Safarov

In the evening of February 23, Azad Safarov was sitting in a café in Kyiv’s Podil district, drinking coffee with a British journalist who was crying in anticipation of the great war, and said that Ukraine would probably cease to exist. Azad was trying to explain to him that the Ukrainians were determined to fight.

A few hours afterwards, in his hotel room, he was woken up in astonishment by the sounds of explosions he was used to hearing in the eastern part of the country, not in Kyiv. Azad knocked on the door of his colleague’s room and said that the war had begun, yet the latter just shrugged off his warning.

In several minutes, Azad’s crew went up to the observation deck of St. Andrew’s Church on the Andriivskyi Descent. It was about 5 am, and the glow from explosions could be seen in the distance. The producer said that a war in Europe in the 21st century was insane. While she was shocked, though, Azad was only surprised to see a morning jogger and a lady who was walking her dog.

“I had a panic attack on the very first day,” he recalls. “It was not caused by the fear of death but by the fear of captivity. The attack lasted for just an hour, and then I promised to focus primarily on helping others and think about everything else later. And I still haven’t thought about it.”

Azad began to work on two fronts: producing for six Sky News teams in different regions of Ukraine, and managing the Voices of Children Foundation.

The foundation was officially established in 2019 by the human rights advocate Olena Rozvadovska, who had been already engaged in children’s rights defending for more than ten years. Since 2015 Olena had been living in the east of Ukraine, evacuating families from the combat zone, delivering humanitarian aid and organizing psychological support for children. It was Azad who instigated her to establish the foundation. Olena had helped him and the filmmaker Simon Lereng Vilmont with their second documentary about children growing up in the frontline zone. In 2017 they made another film, The Distant Barking of Dogs. Two years afterwards, Azad and Simon needed help with gaining access to orphanages.

Simon had never made more than one film in the same country, but he came back to work in Ukraine.

“He just fell in love with this country,” says Azad. “He said that he felt like his home was there. He was impressed at how strangers took care of him and enquired about him, since he was used to much greater social distance and restraint in Denmark. Together with Simon, I started getting interested in the Donbas too: though I spent 14 years of my life in Donetsk, I’d never enjoyed it. And yet this region opened up for me during the production of the film. I’ve met a lot of tolerant, open-minded, kind and pro-Ukrainian people who treated our work with understanding and support.”

On the first day of shooting the second film, the crew went with Olena to evacuate a family from the village of Zolote, and they came under fire. An exploded projectile blew out all the windows in their car. After the journey, Azad bought a cake and candles because he considered that day to be his second birthday. He was convinced that Simon would stop shooting, yet he decided to go on. Simon came to Ukraine with increasing frequency. This is how A House Made of Splinters – the documentary about the kids in a Donbas orphanage – emerged.

After the film was screened in Severodonetsk, one of its protagonists, an adolescent boy who was considered a difficult child, found himself a foster family. As for Azad, this is better than any Oscar. And it’s possible the team will receive one of the famous statuettes too, because A House Made of Splinters has been nominated for the award for best documentary feature film, as well as for the Film Independent Spirit Awards – the so called ‘alternative Oscars’ – which will be presented at the beginning of March.

The teachers who became the protagonists of the documentary will come to Los Angeles to both awards ceremonies. Azad says that’s a present for them.

“It was them and the kids who made our film appealing to the audience,” he explains. “This is not a merry film, but it gives people hope.”

The team’s previous documentary, The Distant Barking of Dogs, was shortlisted for an Oscar, yet Azad is happy that A House Made of Splinters was actually nominated for the award because it had been partially funded by Ukraine. He hopes that this would be a film which can impress Ukrainians and influence the foreign audience, and make them better understand the essence of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Social workers from various regions are already asking Azad for permission to screen the film to parents who want to adopt children, while human rights defenders expect it to become an instrument of advocacy to reform the orphanages and boost the transfers of children to foster families.

The Voices of Children Foundation emerged owing to this very film. Its team primarily consisted of seven people plus an equal number of psychologists near the frontline. Now there are many more of them: the organization gets international press, and celebrities like Madonna and Oprah Winfrey call to donate them money. Many foundations stopped working in the first months of the full-scale invasion, but the Voices of Children has grown in strength because Olena invited the people who lost their jobs in bigger organizations to participate in its processes.

During the day, Azad worked as a producer, and after carrying out his main duties, he helped with managing the foundation. Many families had to be assisted and evacuated, many psychologists found, many letters answered. Azad accommodated people in empty apartments, as well as the hotel rooms rented permanently by Sky News for their journalists, and borrowed the crews’ cars to evacuate the casualties.

“There’s nothing special about me: it’s just a peculiarity of the time,” says Azad. “My first, chaotic reaction was to help others, to do something at least. That was a very difficult period, but we managed to keep emotionally alive due to our work, since it helped us to distract from thinking about global things, our future, and ourselves.”

Azad had an opportunity to leave the country after the invasion: officially, he lives in Germany, but he had been working in Ukraine since December 2021.

“It would have been a betrayal on my part if I had fled,” says he. “I’ve spent more than twenty years in Ukraine, and it has offered me a lot: a place to live, a cool and tolerant society, a possibility to work and study, and the knowledge of how important it is to stand up for my rights and liberties. Besides, my fiancée would have never left Ukraine either. The work of journalists, producers, fixers, and local producers seems so very important to me nowadays: I’m not sure whether we could have convinced the West to change their mindset and provide us with weapons or humanitarian aid without their endeavors.”

Today, Azad works as the chief producer for the British TV channel in Ukraine. At the beginning of the invasion he was assisting six crews: finding local producers and cars, getting permits and passes for them, bringing them out from under Russian shell strikes, explaining Ukrainian realities to them – and he is still doing this now.

Together with his crews, Azad saw the Russians razing Bakhmut to the ground. He remembers this town, with its pizzerias, bus stops, service stations and a sports stadium very well: he had witnessed its development, whereas now life in Bakhmut has simply frozen. Together with the journalists, Azad convinced the adults to evacuate children from the basements in Soledar. They could have all died at a hotel in Pokrovsk, in the city of Dnipro, or somewhere on the road.

“All these moments are imprinted in the mind, but this is something like disk recording,” says Azad. “As soon as something new happens, old stuff is forgotten. It’s the nice things that are remembered. The liberation of Kherson erased everything else.”

Azad’s crew was the first among the journalists who made it to liberated Kherson. On November 11 they were shooting in a village located 16 km from the city, and after the work was done, they learned that Kherson had just been liberated. The journalists asked the press officer for permission to come to the city, but they were denied entrance. By that night, however, Azad got a call from an acquaintance of his who said that a top officer would accompany them to Kherson the next morning.

The locals who spent half a year under Russian occupation could only hug both the Ukrainian-speaking arrivals and the foreigners.

“We managed to document the first moments after the city was liberated,” Azad recalls. “The people were positively happy: they hugged us, and we couldn’t even walk along any street. On November 12, we were stopped in Chornobaivka: people just came out onto the road and never let us go until they had hugged everyone. It was a very sincere moment. Something like that can never happen again.”

For Azad, the days in liberated Kherson became some of the happiest in his life. His crew was deprived of its accreditation in Ukraine after that journey, though they recovered all their permits within five days following a public scandal. Nevertheless, that situation showed the urgent problem that the press services have, with many employees who still labor under the Soviet mindset: in Azad’s opinion, these people do not fully understand how counteracting Russian propaganda should be done.

“There is no need for exclusives,” he is convinced. “We need as many people as possible to see Ukrainian flags and the joy of liberation. This will bring us more aid. The way Ukrainians are reclaiming their land is the best motivator for Scholtz and Macron.”

Azad dreams that thousands of moments and stories from this war – from both the civilians and the military – will be documented and remembered. He wants to enter Donetsk with his crew after the city is liberated, to see its streets and his own apartment. Up until then, he is determined to work for as long as it takes, despite the lack of resources and energy.

“I hope that as soon as we win the war and the foundation is standing firmly on its feet, I will quit this job and go make films,” says Azad. “Mere journalism is no longer as attractive to me as documentary cinema, because it’s the latter that makes it possible to tell a more in-depth story.”