Film studio’s finest achievement in the bag thanks to kids’ stories of hope

Brown Bag’s film to help Russian orphans is their finest achievement yet, says Jonathan deBurca Butler.

DAMIEN O’Connor of Brown Bag Films vividly remembers the day he first encountered Debbie Deegan from the children’s charity To Russia with Love.

“I was sitting in work and I got a phone call from this woman I’d never met before,” he recalls. “She basically asked if I’d be interested in making a 30-second animated advert for their website. I explained that I wouldn’t. And I was on the phone to her for about 45 minutes explaining why; we were just so busy. After the call I went back to my desk and there was an email from her saying basically ‘right, where do we go from here?’”

Intrigued by the charity director’s tenacity, O’Connor decided to have a look at their website where he found a story he couldn’t leave alone. To Russia with Love was founded in 1998 when Debbie adopted a little girl from an orphanage in Russia. The Dubliner was so moved by the bleak conditions in which the children lived that she rallied family and friends to help her set up a charity that would improve the lot of orphaned children in Russia. As well as having its own orphanage, Hortolova, in Bryansk, it also offers programmes of care in orphanages across the country.

“Once I read the children’s stories I was hooked,” says the 42-year-old director. “It was heartbreaking to read their stories. So I went back to Debbie and said I’d do something but only if we made a short film. I felt it would be far more use. People would be more likely to share it and talk about it than a 30-second advert. So I put together a draft of the story based on what I’d read, did up a storyboard and at that stage she suggested I go over to Hortolova.”

O’Connor, who is father to a five-year-old, said the experience was “profound”. Although he had worked on a documentary about landmines in Angola, he was approaching this with the eyes of a father.

“It was like walking into the cartoon,” says O’Connor. “I had visualised the situation so much in my head but meeting the kids actually changed the direction of the film because the one thing that really leapt out was the message of hope and I hadn’t really expected that. What I hadn’t thought about was what happens to these children after they leave the orphanage. So I didn’t want it to be some sad story, that their lives hadn’t improved. I definitely wanted there to be a message at the end for the kids. If I hadn’t gone to Hortolova, that side of it would have been lacking in the film.”

When O’Connor returned home and informed his colleagues of what he had seen, the Oscar-nominated studio threw its substantial and creditable weight behind the project. The result is ANYA, a four-minute animation about an orphan girl who seeks refuge at Hortolova. It is a touching film on the value of nurture over shelter. Only four words are uttered in the film but they carry huge power and get the message of the charity’s ethos across: ‘Dream Big, Little One’.

Throughout 14 weeks of production, 80 people offered their services voluntarily to make the film. Original music was provided by Darren Hendley, voices were provided by actress Chulpan Khamatova (Goodbye Lenin) while others sourced original materials to help the look and feel of the movie. As always with a Brown Bag production, the attention to detail is meticulous; even down to the lace curtains.

“The windows that you see are the windows of Russia,” says Damien. “We have someone in here who’s married to a Russian woman and we had Georgian windows in the first version of the piece so they were out when she saw it. Then she said ‘where’s the lace, you have to have the lace; it’s part of Russian window dressing’. The corridor in the film is the corridor of Hortolova, the classroom is the classroom of Hortolova, the light switches, the light bulbs, everything is matched.”

O’Connor has just returned from the launch of the film in Russia where he faced potentially his most critical audience to date.

“I was really nervous,” he says. “But the kids love it and some of the older children who came back with their own children came up to me and shook my hand. The kids in the orphanage have it on all the time. They think they’re movie stars.” Little ones dreaming big.

* You can watch ANYA at www.vimeo.com/brownbagfilms