30/01/2026 - Dino Hodic’s feature film debut sees him returning to his homeland to reconstruct his own personal story and investigate his origins

Having fled to Switzerland when he was just a little boy in order to save his skin, Dino Hodic returns to his birth country, Bosnia, in his first feature film, No One Will Hurt You, to try to understand what remains of his childhood and the ghosts inhabiting a land which was the setting for unspeakable violence. The movie was presented in the Solothurn Film Festival’s Panorama section for feature films, where it won the Visioni Prize, having previously screened in a world premiere last year in the Sarajevo Film Festival’s BH Film line-up. Telling the story of Hasan, one of the few people to have survived the Srebrenica massacre, No One Will Hurt You speaks with candour and deep respect about all those forced to live with the pain of having lost their loved ones.

An intimate, delicate and indispensable depiction of a wounded land, the film restores dignity to all those who were killed in the name of cruel grievances which still haunt Bosnia today. Through staggeringly brutal archive footage – emaciated bodies of walking men who already look like ghosts, corpses piled up in the street as if mere rubbish, small yet significant details such as a bare, muddy foot in the cold depths of winter – and modern-day images, of the director’s grandparents, for example, and of Hasan himself who revisits the sites of the massacre, the film interweaves the stories of those who fled carrying with them the pain of the people left behind.

Thirty years after the Srebrenica massacre, the director returns to his birth village to try to piece together his own story: that of a child who fled with his family to Switzerland, uprooted from his homeland and forced to live forever between two worlds, two cultures and two identities. Struck to the core by one of the most powerful stories he’d heard as a child, about a little boy who’d carried his murdered brother on his shoulders for kilometres, determined to give him a dignified burial, the director set out in search of him. As a result, the film tells the incredibly moving story of Hasan, the little boy who’s now all grown up and who Dino Hodic has managed to track down. The director teams up with him to visit the places he once passed through, highlighting the terrible contrast between the beauty of (almost) all these lands now they’ve been reclaimed by nature and the horror to which these very same places bore witness. But these breathtaking natural surrounds don’t simply hide the traces of the massacre - bullets, bones, clothes and identity papers; they also conceal the ghosts of people who lost their lives.

Sober and intense but also intimate and profound, No One Will Hurt You is a film steeped in sincerity, a moving portrait of a man (Hasan but also Dino himself) who’s found the strength to speak on behalf of all of those who no longer have a voice. The terrible irony of the film lies in its title, which summarises the broken promise made by far too many people.

No One Will Hurt You was produced by Fiumi Film and RSI Radiotelevisione svizzera.

(Translated from Italian)