No One's Child

In the spring of 1988 a wild boy is found deep in the Bosnian Mountains living amongst wolves. He is given the name of Haris and sent to orphanage in Belgrade to be taken care of by Ilke. He becomes inseparable from little Zika, who protects him from the bullies, and slowly starts pronouncing first words. It’s just the beginning of a long inner journey for the boy. Suddenly the History beats hard and the wild boy should take his first own decisions.

Shot in a naturalistic, almost conventional way, in the beginning the film seems just another wolf-kid story (well, making you think about Truffaut? Not bad at all!). But step by step the main topic starts to surface: the desire to live and to survive, to belong and to be love. And the film definitively grows as it does the metaphor with the story with the last years of former Yugoslavia, with more main questions taking another prism: what makes us human, what makes beast and the contrast between nature and civilization. At this point we are already engaged with this lost boy, as lost as Europe seems to be.

Vuk Ršumović, after studying at Belgrade’s Art Dramatic Faculty writes scripts for animations, shorts, documentaries and directs some TV programs, as well as collaborates with the main Serbian Theatre. His first incursion in full length film is a powerful and symbolic story, deeply touching for moments. Through balancing between crude moments, and emotional ones, Vuk delivers a surprisingly mature first feature film that makes him the great winner of last Venice Critics' Week.

PÖFF / Javier Garcia Puerto

Serbia 2014