No Man's Land

During the war in Bosnia, two soldiers, one Bosniak and one Serb, are trapped in a trench between the lines. Between them lies a wounded third man with a bouncing mine placed underneath him; if he gets up it goes off. They can move neither forward nor back. Then the United Nations arrive, and after them the international press. The subject is not war but institutions that cannot resolve anything. The peacekeepers wait for orders, the commanders take no responsibility, the journalist chases her story. The man on the mine has to lie still through all of it, and nobody can speed that detail up. The form stays almost entirely in one trench; black comedy is used and the outcome never softens. It is Danis Tanović's first feature. He worked as a cameraman in the Bosnian army during the war and some of his footage entered the archive, so the waiting he describes is direct observation. The film took the screenplay prize at Cannes in 2001 and won the foreign language Oscar the following year, in a category that also included Amélie. Branko Đurić and Rene Bitorajac play the two soldiers and Filip Šovagović the man on the mine. Who it is for: viewers who like films that look at war through institutional failure. Who it is not for: anyone looking for hope; the film ends in deadlock and does it deliberately.