No Man's Land

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Logan D Jul 27 A Bosnian and Serb are stranded in a trench between enemy lines during the Bosnian War. A descendant of MASH, this film is skillfully depicted portrayal of the absurdity of war. Emotional, darkly funny, and authentic. See more dave s 06/06/2022 Set during the conflict between the Serbs and the Bosnians, three soldiers, one Serb and two Bosnians, find themselves trapped and fighting for survival between enemy lines in an abandoned trench. When an impotent branch of the UN arrives on the scene with the self-serving media in tow, things become significantly more complicated. No Man's Land is a powerful film, a condemnation of the conflict itself, with undercurrents of how self-centered greed and bureaucracy will almost certainly worsen matters. Beautifully shot and acted, it is filled with moral dilemmas and unexpected turns and finishes with one of the most memorable shots imaginable, emphasizing the futility of everything that preceded it. See more s r @ScottR 01/28/2022 1001 movies to see before you die. An ambitious project that takes on the Serbian Bosnian conflict with an interesting light. It pits both sides in a neutral zone to show the silliness of the conflict and the involvement of the UN's hypocrisy. It was entertaining and well made. It was on Tubi. See more 12/06/2021 In the trenches. So this is about three soldiers stuck in no man's land during the Bosnian war. Two of them (Branko Đurić, Rene Bitorajac) are on opposing sides and mobile enough, but the third (Filip Šovagović) is incapacitated. He is lying on a land mine and cannot move without setting it off. Tension starts to mount as the U.N. tries to deescalate the impossible situation. Now, I saw this once before, and it left an awfully large impression. I've wanted to come back and revisit it for quite some time, but war movies being war movies, they don't work their way into my rotation all that often. I kept up my lazy Saturday and decided to dig up the old DVD. No Man's Land is still as outstanding as I remember. I feel like war stories work best when they get intimate and personal instead of trying to paint the big sweeping picture, and that is precisely what No Man's Land does. It creates a microcosm for the entire war in an enclosed space, and I think that is just brilliant. Which side is in the right and which side is in the wrong depends entirely on who has the loaded gun at a specific moment. The power dynamic can change on a dime, and it just goes to show how a viewpoint can shift when you consider that history books are written by the victor. It shows how other countries can intervene and make things better or worse, and it even shows the role that the media plays with coverage since that can drastically change the optics of the world's opinion. It's a simplification, yes, but it shows you how much egos have to do with these high-toll skirmishes at the end of the day. I also love how this devolves into a schoolyard fight with these two soldiers arguing about which side started it. This war is not a conflict that I know a ton about, but this movie isn't here to give you a history lesson. It is here to give soldiers' points of view, and that will always be next to impossible to be unbiased. There's solid acting from the entire cast, most of which reminded me of American counterparts. Đurić has a Robert De Niro quality, and a U.N. sergeant played by Georges Siatidis is a ringer for Adrien Brody. No Man's Land is one of my very favorite War movies of all time, and I think everybody will be able to connect with it on a human level. See more Tony S 11/14/2021 A dark allegory to the entire Bosnian war, captured in a hypothetical scenario. Narrative doesn't take sides and every participant of the conflict, from, Serbian to Bosnian soldiers, from UN to journalists, is portrayed with a satirical fervor to drive this allegory. The film explicitly highlights the ridiculousness of the situation in the trench and the nature of this war itself. Yet only few characters acknowledge this and are helpless to do anything. Good performances with quite ironic castings, to further highlight craziness of it all. The dark ending will most definitely leave the audience at a complete uneasiness, flushing any previously showed levity of the scenario, turning the entire film towards the highest degree of morbidity. See more William L 11/06/2021 No Man's Land is a parable for the Bosnian War and plays out like it - two men, one a Bosnian Serb (Nino), the other an ethnic Bosniak (Čiki) find themselves stuck in a trench in between their respective fronts. Because the movie has to happen they ignore several opportunities to kill one another and use the time they gain to play out a few heavy-handed commentaries on the conflict, including how both are perceived as in the right and they are both actually rather similar despite their supposedly irreconciliable differences (it comes up that they know the same woman back home). There are some solid moments in the film, some well-placed satire, and an on-point depiction of the UN as a bloated and ineffectual bureaucracy more focused on image than efficacy; thematically, it feels well-placed. However, there's a lot that looks familiar when considering other depictions of civil conflict (needless suffering and antagonists that are just reflections of each other); the ending is actually quite potent, though - a wounded man laying on a landmine, which has attracted the attention of both the media and the higher-ups, is ultimately left to die once the optics are in hand. If the movie dived a bit deeper into humor, it would have landed even harder. (3/5) See more Read all reviews

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