“No Man’s Land”, 2001

Rarely has a movie knocked me on my ass quite like this one.

Set in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the civil war in 1993, it follows two enemy soldiers, Ciki and Nino, who become trapped together in a trench between battle lines. Ciki’s friend has been booby trapped by Nino’s side, the Serbs: he is laying on a bouncing bomb, which will explode if he moves, and Nino can’t disarm it. The two enemies must watch over him until help comes in the form of UN troops—if it does come.

Branko Djuric, who plays Ciki, was incredibly easy to watch. He has a sort of dangerous innocence, and his mobile facial expressions add almost a second dialogue to his part. I found it difficult to look away from the screen, and not just because the movie’s in subtitles—I didn’t want to miss one moment of the nonverbal interaction of the actors.

“No Man’s Land” won Bosnia an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Director Danis Tanovic takes a well-used plot device—enemies thrown together in unexpected intimacy—and a simple stage-set backdrop, and transcends them both with a vengeance. The film drops violence, humor, satire, horror, and pathos, with no warning, building in the viewer a raw and incredible emotion.

The characters are extremely human in a way that stings. The shots are close up; you feel trapped right there with them. No punches will be pulled; but you’re alive enough to take them.

Many reviewers of this movie focus on its portrayal of the absurdities of war, with the two soldiers as symbols of the entire Yugoslav conflict. It affected me more directly—I saw it as a reflection of the ridiculousness of interpersonal hatreds, of how arbitrary and yet intractable they can be.

But the best aspect of the movie is that it avoids the tendency of a typical war film to either shy away into abstraction and analysis, or numb itself with bloodspill and spectacle. Here, themes take a backseat to reality, just as in life. The bullets are less important than the pain, both emotional and physical, that they cause. Movies like “No Man’s Land” are mirrors, showing us a vital humanity that we all have, dangerously, in common.

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