The boy from the river Drina film card

Il ragazzo della Drina

The boy from the river Drina

Zijad Ibrahimovic 

73' / 

Switzerland 

/ 2025

Screenings

Irvin, who survived the Srebrenica massacre as a child, returns to the family home in the Drina Valley after thirty years. He needs to come to terms with the demons that torment him and to rebuild his relationship with his homeland and its traditions. In the same meadows and woods where people once sought refuge, he decides to build a small village with his own hands. The project offers him an opportunity to reflect on his life and that of his family, on the war, and on his relationship with the nature that saves him. His first-person account reveals the wounds he carries within him, the painful aftermath of the war. For him, working and telling his story is a way of processing his personal past and that of the dead, to whom he seeks to restore dignity. The director follows him closely, leaving him entirely in the spotlight in a portrait without rhetoric, where the memory of what happened confronts the desire to understand what could still happen and how to prevent it.

photo of Zijad Ibrahimovic

Zijad Ibrahimovic

ZijadIbrahimovic

Born in 1978 in Loznica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, he fled his country with his family in 1992 at the outbreak of the war. Since then, he has lived and worked in Ticino, southern Switzerland. He began his career as a director in 2007, graduating from the CISA International Academy of Audiovisual Sciences in Lugano. In addition to being a filmmaker, he is a photographer, painter, and sculptor. He is the author of the documentaries Custodi di guerra (2009) and Periferia del nulla (2016). 

photo of Zijad Ibrahimovic