No Man’s Land, 3/16/13, Best Foreign Language Film, 2001No Man’s Land is set during the Bosnian war, and focuses on two soldiers, one a Bosnian and the other a Bosnian-Serb, who find themselves stuck together in a trench between the two fighting sides. At first I was watching it as a film about the war, but as other pieces started to fall into place, it started to seem like some kind of wicked satire on war and the international politics surrounding it. As long as the two men are stuck in the trench together, both sides have a temporary cease fire, if one kills the other, it’s over; complicating the issue is there is also a Bosnian soldier, who when he was thought dead, was moved onto a booby-trapped bouncing grenade, and if he moved at all, it would explode, spraying deadly shrapnel all around, killing all in the trench. The UN forces monitoring the situation want to try and help, instead of just ‘observe’ which was their brief. This is where the absurdity begins, with the bureaucratic paralysis that has come to symbolize UN intervention. The French UN team on the ground wants to help; the UN leadership (in this case, commanded by a British officer) wants them to do nothing. And the ending left me wanting to know how the event ended (not how I would have thought). The events that follow are infuriating and represent the frustration that actually happened during the Bosnian war, with the whole world just watching as the region imploded. It’s an interesting movie, and worth a watch.
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No Man’s Land, 3/16/13, Best Foreign Language Film, 2001No Man’s Land is set during the Bosnian war, and focuses on two soldiers, one a Bosnian and the other a Bosnian-Serb, who find themselves stuck together in a trench between the two fighting sides. At first I was watching it as a film about the war, but as other pieces started to fall into place, it started to seem like some kind of wicked satire on war and the international politics surrounding it. As long as the two men are stuck in the trench together, both sides have a temporary cease fire, if one kills the other, it’s over; complicating the issue is there is also a Bosnian soldier, who when he was thought dead, was moved onto a booby-trapped bouncing grenade, and if he moved at all, it would explode, spraying deadly shrapnel all around, killing all in the trench. The UN forces monitoring the situation want to try and help, instead of just ‘observe’ which was their brief. This is where the absurdity begins, with the bureaucratic paralysis that has come to symbolize UN intervention. The French UN team on the ground wants to help; the UN leadership (in this case, commanded by a British officer) wants them to do nothing. And the ending left me wanting to know how the event ended (not how I would have thought). The events that follow are infuriating and represent the frustration that actually happened during the Bosnian war, with the whole world just watching as the region imploded. It’s an interesting movie, and worth a watch.