Not only the story of conflicting sides, it adds two new elements to the modern war picture: neutral troops supporting humanitarian action, who enact the orders of distant superiors in both the Serbian and Bosnian factions; and a flock of scoop-hungry journalists swooping over the action like vultures. The villains here are neither Bosnians nor Serbs, but attitudes, actions, and inactions. There are no heroes.

Three soldiers - two Bosnians and a Serb - are stranded in a trench in the "no man's land" between the Serb and Bosnian lines. The trench happens to have been dug into a scenic meadow with a panoramic view of the surrounding mountains (Slovenia stands in for Bosnia-Herzegovina in the movie, and the area bears a strong resemblance to the foothills of the Smokies in Western NC). Anyone attempting to exit the trench in daylight will surely be shot, and one of the soldiers is lying atop an unexploded mine. In one of the movie's many believably absurd moments, two of the soldiers strip to their boxers to show their defenselessness and leap around the lip of the trench waving a white t-shirt. Their predicament is noted by both sides, and the struggle to send in UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) help begins.

The relationship between the two main characters is fascinating. The distant enemy and the enemy five feet away can be the same man, yet we apply different standards to each. The young, fastidious Serb, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), wants to introduce himself; the older, more embittered Bosnian, Tchiki (Bosnian comic actor Branko Djuric), an urban type in a Rolling Stones t-shirt, thinks it's idiotic to shake hands with someone you could kill in cold blood the next day, and scornfully rebuffs the younger soldier. The movie focuses on the absurd and the cruel, and what is so disturbing is that it never has to sidestep reality to do so. Tchiki is weary of fighting, and believes his cause is just and that the other side started the war. Nino is exactly the same. Chatting over cigarettes as they wait for help, they realize that Nino went to school with Tchiki's old girlfriend.

Bosnian documentary filmmaker's Danis Tanovic's slice-of-life directorial style (he filmed the front lines in Sarajevo for the Bosnian army film archive) is ideal for his gritty screenplay, which won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes. He shows the mellow quietude of the rolling meadow surrounded by green mountains with the same care and realism he gives a scene of fleeing soldiers being shot and killed by their enemies. (Quite possibly he's already documented similar scenes for the historic archive.) Despite the bleakness of the subject, Tanovic has an almost mischievous sensibility - laughs sneak up on you, and many of them aren't cynical. Tanovic knows that real people fight wars, and real people laugh and say stupid things, even when fighting a war. His fighters aren't ignoble or evil, just human.

It's a truly international film in both its production and in whom we see onscreen. It was a production of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Belgium, France, Italy, Slovenia, and the U.K., and the soldiers talk in Bosnian, the UNPROFOR troops talk in French, and the British journalist trying to scoop the happenings in the trench delivers her coverage in English. Seeing these people interact and speak one another's languages, one feels a strange and uniquely American isolation, knowing we are a nation surrounded by ourselves, not so much lazy as painfully isolated, unmotivated to learn about the rest of the world.

Naturalistic acting leavens and flavors the black comedy, notably that of three solders trapped in the trench (Filip Sovagovic as the Bosnian soldier Tsera has few lines but is so natural he almost makes you forget he's an actor) and Georges Sitiadis as the hapless UNPROFOR official, Marchand, who is tortured, in grand antiwar-story fashion, by his own morality.

No Man's Land is a black comedy that mirrors reality all too closely, unblinkingly depicting not so much the horror of war as its absurdity, and the human ability to walk away from horror without bothering to help. You'll laugh, sure. But you'll walk out silently, deep in thought.

Jennifer Saylor, February 22, 2002