No Man's Land

Films about the Yugoslav war have tended to prove less than successful in box-office terms over here, whatever their artistic merit – but you would be doing yourself a diservice to overlook Danis Tanovic’s tense, disquieting thriller.

Directed by a Bosnian, and starring an essentially Croatian cast, No Man’s Land manages to avoid the idiocies of the recent Hollywood atrocity Behind Enemy Lines, and though hardly flawless, it’s a real curiosity and deserves its Best Foreign Language Oscar.

It’s whatever the opposite of a buddy movie is, with the central characters Ciki and Nino being (respectively) a Bosnian and a Serb stranded between enemy lines during 1993, referred to in the region as the ‘Summer of Love’. The antagonists are unintentionally forced into a position of mutual reliance on one another, as Tasovic uses the tense scenario of a standoff and a UNPROFOR intervention to sketch out some illustration of the black madness that engulfed his homeland.

Though the subject matter ensures that the feelgood factor never really reaches Saturday Night Fever levels, No Man’s Land is an admirable addition to the canon of movies chronicling (or more usually simplifying) the most fascinating and horrifying episode of modern European history.