No Man’s Land

Danis Tanovic wrote and directed this bracing, dourly satiric war-is-hell story in which absurdity and grim reality are inseparably joined at the hip. Bosnian soldier Sera (Filip Sovagovic) survives a field artillery explosion and awakens atop a land mine in a trench between two battling forces. One of his comrades (Branko Djuric) and an enemy Serb soldier (Rene Bitorajac) have also taken refuge in the trench as a Global News crew and a United Nations peacekeeping squadron monitor their welfare and volatile standoff. This sort of Bosnia-Herzegovina version of Waiting for Godot is a rather familiar futility-of-war tale boiled down to intimate, face-to-face confrontations and freshly repainted with broad strokes of deadpan bitterness and modern madness. It’s a rueful scream for sanity that asks us to ponder the possibility of true neutrality when organized murder may be masquerading as civil war.