First movie a landmine of Balkan information

PETER CALDER talks to an Oscar-nominated Bosnian filmmaker flummoxed by the success of his war film.

When Danis Tanovic - a Bosnian volunteer in the appalling conflict which enveloped the countries of the former Yugoslavia - went to war he was unarmed, but he managed to do plenty of shooting.

From 1992 to 1994, the 32-year-old film student was in Sarajevo under siege but rifles were in short supply.

"I was on patrol with four other guys," he recalls , "but we only had one gun between us. So I took a camera and just started filming what was happening because it was madness."

In the end he shot 300 hours of frontline footage for the Bosnian Army archive. And the madness he observed became the basis of a feature film which has taken the world by storm.

No Man's Land, a clammy but bleakly comic drama about a two soldiers - one Bosnian, one Serb - thrown together in a trench between opposing lines, earned the Paris-based Tanovic the screenplay laurel at Cannes last year, was named best foreign film at the Golden Globes and is a strong contender for the same crown at the Oscars next week.

It has garnered almost three dozen such honours, although Tanovic is unsurprisingly proudest of the reception it received at the Sarajevo Film Festival in August when it was named the favourite by audiences and critics.

That success is testament to its extraordinary poise and control, its ability to find humour in unimaginable horror. Other films, from Michael Winterbottom's Welcome To Sarajevo (much of which was set in London) to the Hollywood spectacular Behind Enemy Lines, have dealt with the conflict but none manages to find the grimly absurdist heart of the war which No Man's Land dissects so elegantly.

Its three main characters - the antagonists are joined by a third who recovers consciousness to find he is lying on a land mine which will explode if he moves - spend the film in extreme peril.

But at the same time the movie is a surrealistically funny black comedy, part M*A*S*H, part Waiting for Godot, with a killer punchline all the more powerful for being unexpected.

Its humour derives from the skewed sense of reality which can create a line like a bloodstained soldier in a trench casting a newspaper aside and snorting, "God, what a mess in Rwanda". Tanovic explains that the vein of humour which runs through it is uniquely Bosnian.

"Bosnians have a history of humour," he says. "We were known for it even before this war, because the history of our country has been a history of conflict, and not just in Bosnia itself.

"There were always some countries that were trying to get a piece of it - Romans, Turks, Hungarians, whoever - so I guess these people developed what you might call a mountain cynicism which you don't find in people who live on the plains."

The film's sense of assurance is remarkable not just because it is Tanovic's first feature but because it was written in 14 days, shot in 27 and edited in 10.

"I wrote it quickly, yes," says Tanovic, "but I had it in my head for a long time. And because of this, when it came to shooting it, I didn't have much time so I shot it the way I was going to cut it. I shot very little I didn't use."

Behind Enemy Lines, the Hollywood version of the war, portrays the Serbs as cardboard-cutout villains but Tanovic, despite his background - or perhaps because of it - has a firmer grasp of the shifting nature of right and wrong.

Events conspire to give each of his main characters the chance to extract from the other at gunpoint an admission of blame (the film's commonest answer to the question "Why" is "Because I've got a gun and you haven't"), and he reserves his most acid venom for the United Nations Protection Forces (nicknamed "Smurfs" for their blue and white livery) and the media.

A satellite plot has a UN general, tellingly named Soft, concerned to give the impression of decisiveness while doing nothing and a television news reporter turning the standoff in the trench into primetime, real-life soap opera. Meanwhile, in one of the film's best running jokes, no one speaks the native language of the French soldiers who make up most of the UN forces.

Tanovic snorts with contempt when asked whether his depiction of the UN is not excessively harsh.

"They contributed nothing for two years except feed people. They have to decide what they stand for. Their neutrality pisses me off. How can you be neutral and stand by while somebody is being raped or killed? It's a word that's invented for not taking action. They resolve conflict when there are oil fields in question. The rest of the world doesn't matter."

He is bitterly conscious that the Balkan conflict has become yesterday's story.

"We live in a past world, unfortunately," he says. "The situation is better but while you have criminals [like Serb leader Radovan Karadzic] walking around, how can you call the situation normal? It's like having Hitler walking around Germany in the 1950s or Osama bin Laden walking the streets of New York."

The film's central image of a man lying on a mine seems like an irresistible metaphor for the region the world now ignores, but Tanovic didn't conceive it that way.

"I like metaphors to come out of what happens rather than being imposed. The film has an ending that nobody expects, but somehow it's the only end that is possible and it reflects not only my country but also the situation of the world. When you look around, we are all lying on a mine."

Tanovic plans to start writing another film soon, but for now his time is taken up with answering the world interest in his first. He enjoys the attention but never expected it.

"Even if you are a director with 10 movies behind you, you can't expect this kind of success."

And has it changed the life of the one-time unarmed soldier? "What do you think? Nobody ever called me from New Zealand before to have an interview."

* No Man's Land opens tomorrow.