Swiss Bosnians process trauma of war at Sarajevo Film Festival

Bosnian human rights activist Irvin Mujčić returns to Srebrenica, the site of one of the worst atrocities of the Yugoslavian civil war of the 1990s, in the documentary "The Boy from the River Drina". Rough Cat Films

Two Swiss documentaries, The Boy from the River Drina and No One Will Hurt You, delve into a violent history, rejecting the silence over the Bosnian War maintained by those who fled the former Yugoslavia and sought refuge in Switzerland. The personal, even taboo themes of these stories allow the directors to process trauma and promote healing.

Zijad Ibrahimović and Dino Hodić were only boys when their families fled Bosnia after war broke out in the Balkans in the early 1990s. Both are now at home in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and both are filmmakers turning to their personal histories to breathe new life into the stories of migrants from Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia.

Ibrahimović’s The Boy from the River Drina (Il ragazzo della Drina) and Hodić’s No One Will Hurt You (Nessuno vi farà del male), two Swiss documentaries about returning to Bosnia to understand and to heal, recently screened at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival.

This important creative platform has its roots in a dark time in the country’s history: its first edition took place during the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo by Serbian nationalist forces from 1992 to 1996. Sarajevo still bears the scars of war: scattered across the city, around 200 craters left by mortar shells have been filled in with red resin. These memorials, shaped like flowers from the impact of the shells, are known as “Sarajevo Roses”.

A river too close, too far

The Boy from the River Drina centres on the river that makes up a large part of the border between present-day Bosnia and Serbia. Both directors are originally from Bosnian cities situated near this important river: Ibrahimović from Loznica and Hodić from Zvornik.

Ibrahimović follows Irvin Mujčić, a well-known Bosnian human rights activist, as he returns to Srebrenica – the site of one of the worst atrocities registered during that war – to devote years to building a village by hand using traditional techniques as a form of healing and personal reconstruction. Mujčić was five when his mother took him and his siblings and fled to Italy, which became his home. The body of his father, who stayed behind, was never found.

No One Will Hurt You draws its haunting title from footage of Serbian nationalist forces attempting to draw out Bosnian Muslim civilians hiding in their homes during the Bosnian War from 1992-1995. In contrast, Hodić combines newsreel footage and the story of Hasan – a survivor of the Srebrenica genocide with whom he became acquainted online after watching a YouTube video – with his own story and interviews with his grandparents about what they witnessed in Bosnia before they fled. Of Hodić’s entire family, only his grandparents decided to return to their lively home in Zvornik.

Digging the traces of war buried in the forests: scene of “No One Will Hurt You”. Rough Cat sagl

Diaspora and emotional distance

Migrants from ex-Yugoslavia make up the largest immigrant group in Switzerland. After the Second World War, programmes for guest workers incentivised economic migration to Switzerland. Refugees from the Yugoslav wars, including the Bosnian War and Kosovo War, dramatically expanded the diaspora in the 1990s.

Though it is home to both filmmakers, Italian-speaking Switzerland had a lower rate of immigration from the region than its French- and German-speaking counterparts. Ibrahimovic completed his cinematic education in Lugano, while Hodić studied directing in Locarno.

The main subjects of both films are from Srebrenica, the site of the 1995 genocide largely perpetrated by the Army of Republika Srpska, an ethnic Serbian militia, which killed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys there. According to the United Nations, two million people left the region around the time of the war, with one million returning by 2004.

Zijad Ibrahimovic Rough Cat sagl

Hodić and Ibrahimović both use emotional distance to cultivate their onscreen worlds, albeit in different ways. Hodić says he felt as though the footage and project were telling him he “needed to be part of the film”. By contrast, Ibrahimović knew from the start that he did not want his own personal journey to be documented as part of the film but that it would inform his portrayal of Mujčić’s quest. “Everyone has a story, and my story helps me to understand other stories,” he says.

By filming Mujčić from behind, Ibrahimović discovered that he could break through the walls that his protagonist had erected. “His stream of consciousness started to become more authentic, more personal, more intimate,” Ibrahimović says.

Ibrahimović’s producer, Nicola Bernasconi, says the director’s own background played a key role. “We wanted to avoid any kind of colonialist or external point of view, like an exotic look at the Balkan reality and the genocide,” he says. “It was important that this had to be filmed by a Bosnian filmmaker.”

While Hodić initially had no intention of including his story onscreen, it developed organically in the edit room in dialogue with Hasan’s own. In doing so, he begins No One Will Hurt You with archival footage of his own childhood, introducing the film’s journey via his own perspective and his journey back to Zvornik, and then later transitions to follow Hasan.

War taboos

Despite calling Switzerland home from a young age, Hodić explains that he often feels more connected to ex-Yugoslavia than his adoptive home. “My connection is not so much in Switzerland, but more with Bosnians living in Bosnia – I don’t know why, but I feel that Bosnia is a large part of my identity,” he says.

Dino Hodić, director of “No One will Hurt You”, also collaborated in the post-production of Ibrahimović’s film. Fiumi Film

Hodić says talking about the war “is a taboo among Swiss people from ex-Yugoslavia” adding that he never discusses it with his Serbian friends. “There’s a shame also as victims, and we’re afraid that we could make someone feel ashamed too.”

Films such as his own may stimulate conversation and bring together people with shared histories, he says. “The most beautiful part of ex-Yugoslavia was that there was diversity, and the most beautiful things were done during those times when everyone was living together peacefully,” Hodić says. “I hope the film goes in this direction. The idea is to get people back together.”

Ibrahimović says his goals are similar. “My main focus was to highlight the light more than the darkness and highlight hope towards the future instead of the loss, tragedy and the wounds that remain. To me, the most important thing is to give the audience a sense of coherence [to Mujčić’s experience] on an emotional level and on an authentic vibration.”

“Dino made this work in the name of reconciliation,” adds Vittoria Fiumi, the producer of No One Will Hurt You. “It’s really interesting to make a film with the second generation, because it can be too tough to work with the first generation on these kinds of stories. I believe in the power of this generation to have the right language and the distance to tell their story.”

“They inherited the war and know what it is, but they didn’t experience it directly, so they can talk about it,” Fiumi says. “I think this distance is very precious for the future, as the next generations won’t know what happened in the same way.”

Edited by Catherine Hickley/ts