No Man's Land

Directed by Danis Tanović (2001) 

Bosnia-Herzegovina (Slovenia, Italy, France, Belgium, and the UK too)

No Man’s Land swept the foreign language film categories in the United States in both the Oscars and the Golden Globes in back in 2001 and won 40 additional film awards, but somehow, this is a movie I would have never come across if I wasn’t researching titles for this blog.

 

The film takes place in the middle of the Bosnia War that occurred from 1992 until 1995 in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. A Bosnian man, Ciki, finds himself wounded & stuck in no man’s land and eventually in the trenches of the Bosnian Serb forces. While in the trenches, he overhears an enemy soldier’s plan on how to best trick the enemy; his ruse is to place the bodies of the enemy onto landmines so that when their fellow soldiers try to move or retrieve the bodies, they will set off a landmine. This angers Ciki, and he shoots Nino, one of the enemy soldiers. While both suffering from injuries, a third soldier lying in the trench, a Bosnian named Cera, comes to consciousness, but he cannot move because he is one of the unfortunate casualties placed on top of a land mine.

No Man’s Land takes place within a series of wars driven by territorial and ethnic disputes that resulted in thousands of casualties, many of whom were victims of war crimes. When Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s (1992 to be exact), the government in Belgrade (modern Serbia) wanted to prevent the country from breaking up. This led to a series of wars between the different ethnic groups of the country and the eventual independence of six nations, taking Yugoslavia off the map and putting it into the history books.

This film, produced not too many years after the conflict, confronts the Bosnian War in a way that you don’t feel like you are watching a full-on war film, but rather one that shows how conflict can or cannot be resolved amongst opposing soldiers and peacekeepers.