LAND OF MINE [DENMARK, GERMANY], THU 5 OCTOBER, 8PM

Academy Award nominee, Best Foreign Language Film 

Few films detail the immediate aftermath of conflict and occupation from World War II. Danish director-writer Martin Zandvliet’s Land of Mine exposes the untold story of Denmark’s darkest hour.

The film is set in the days following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945, when German POWs held in Denmark were forced by the Allied forces to clear the millions of landmines laid by Hitler’s army. Most of these soldiers were teenagers, with minimal or no training in defusing explosives; more than half of them were killed or severely wounded in the process.

Zandvliet sheds light on this historical tragedy as the entry point to a story that involves love, hate, revenge, and reconciliation. Is it ever possible to show sympathy for those who represented the Nazi terror?

“I wanted to explore what happens to a person who loves his country as a patriot and feels a right to hate his enemy, but is put in charge of a task that conflicts with the values he thought he possessed and that his own nation represented,” Zandvliet says. ”Our sergeant protagonist is filled with the same hate that many Danes understandably had for the people who had occupied their country for five years. But he comes to doubt what he is fighting for.

“It was the Germans who laid the mines — who else should remove them? I would probably have forced them to clean up after themselves too, but I hope that I would have given them food, trained them properly so as to reduce the horrific casualties and countless fatalities and, in general, treated them with the dignity that all human beings deserve.

“The point for me is that an eye-for-an-eye mentality, so easily adopted in extreme situations like that portrayed in this movie, ultimately makes losers of us all,” says Zandvliet. – Variety

Click here for official website.

This year’s entry from Denmark in the foreign-film Oscar race, is a harrowing, intelligent, compelling and intensely suspenseful investigation of a little-known footnote to world history. – ★★★★  The Observer

The ethical tension between justice and vengeance is the subject of Martin Zandvliet’s Land of Mine, a tight and suspenseful film. –  The New York Times

UNDER SANDET | Denmark, Germany 2015 | Language: Danish, German | 100 minutes | Cert: Club

Director: Martin Zandvliet

Cast: Roland Møller, Louis Hofmann, Joel Basman