In 1933, the Soviet director Sergei Yutkevich, who had made a film about Ankara, invited Dino to the Lenfil Studios in Leningrad, and with Atatürk's encouragement Dino accepted.
During World War II, he did drawings inspired by the conflict, but his treatment of political subjects in wartime incurred official displeasure, and in 1941 the martial law command of Istanbul exiled him and his elder brother to southeastern Anatolia, where their grandfather had been a governor before.