Two wounded soldiers - one a Serb, the other a Bosnian - find themselves trapped in an abandoned trench. Bitter hostility crackles between the pair as they wait for assistance, locked in a vicious power struggle. Tensions reach boiling point when they discover that another soldier, presumed dead but actually alive, is lying above a mine that will go off should he make the slightest movement.

As the men argue over who started this war in the first place - a matter they can only resolve when a gun is pointed at the other's head - their predicament pulls in an assortment of multi-national characters including a British reporter and a French Unprofor sergeant whose own deadlock parallels that of the soldiers.

DID YOU KNOW?
	No Man's Land won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.    The film also stars Simon Callow and marks one of the last screen appearances of Mike Leigh regular Katrin Cartlidge (Naked) who died in 2002.    Tanovic's is one of those rare war films with surprisingly few combat scenes.

Brilliantly shot and smartly scripted by the director himself, the insightful No Man's Land is brought to life by the performances of Branko Djuric and Rene Bitorajac as the two feuding soldiers who get to know each other better than some of their own comrades. Tanovic skillfully contrasts Nino, the bespectacled new recruit whose crisp uniform belies his lack of combat experience, with Ciki, whose well-worn fatigues suggest the very opposite.

As the standoff in the trench comes to represent the entire Bosnian conflict, so the film's blunt, bleak title takes on wider meaning as events unfold, growing to symbolise the absurdities and impossibilities of war and man's unerring inhumanity to man.

Chris Wiegand