Unit 2: No Man's Land

I could not find L’America or Before the Rain, so I chose to watch No Man’s Land. What an interesting film! In my opinion it does a great job at showing the absurdity of war. Two men, a Bosnian soldier and a Serbian soldier, are left behind in a trench to care for another Bosnian soldier who has been placed on top of a mine. Neither soldier can remove the man from the mine, because doing so will trigger the mine to explode. Here, in turn, lies the absurdity of their situation.
Throughout the film, the main characters are at odds with one another as to how they should treat the other person. Should they be friendly, share cigarettes, exchange names, shoot each other, stab one another, blame the other for starting the war? I feel as if they are both tired of the war but feel they cannot stop. They have to keep hating each other.
This film had some interesting sneak peaks into life in the Balkans in the early/mid 1990s. For example, the UN was not portrayed very highly in this film. Both the Serbian soldiers and the Bosnians referred to UN peacekeeping forces as the ‘smurfs’ and they did very little if anything to help the main characters in this film. I also found it interesting to see that the Serbian soldiers were the ones wearing the military uniforms and the Bosnian soldiers were portrayed in street clothes.

My Practice Blog

This is my practice blog. :)