Land of Mine

There are few peri­ods of his­to­ry as well trod­den by cin­e­ma as World War Two, but it’s a trib­ute to the expan­sive lega­cy of the con­flict that Land of Mine man­ages to unearth a fresh and fierce­ly cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ry. From Dan­ish writer and direc­tor Mar­tin Zand­vli­et, this is a curi­ous tale of Ger­man POWs who are forced to remove mines from post-war Denmark’s coast. It makes for a har­row­ing and earnest sto­ry, deliv­er­ing an emo­tive reflec­tion on the scars left by warfare.

Land of Mine looks at a broad his­tor­i­cal event through eyes of a few whol­ly round­ed char­ac­ters, and to this end the film is superbly cast. A roll call of young Ger­man actors gives a strong impres­sion that the pris­on­ers are lit­tle more than con­fused and home­sick boys. Indeed, pol­i­tics is large­ly ignored in favour of a clos­er exam­i­na­tion of com­rade­ship and per­son­al tragedy. The result­ing dra­ma is admit­ted­ly pre­dictable and the tone often slips into dis­so­nant melo­dra­ma, but the events are nev­er­the­less root­ed in a com­pelling study of indi­vid­ual sur­vival amid gov­ern­ment-orches­trat­ed tragedy.

Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, Land of Mine deals lib­er­al­ly in sequences of beach­side mine-clear­ing, which are con­sis­tent­ly tense and occa­sion­al­ly hor­ri­fy­ing. How­ev­er, the emo­tion­al sub­stance of the film is pri­mar­i­ly found with­in the con­tra­dic­to­ry rela­tion­ship that devel­ops between the Ger­man POWs and their fierce Dan­ish com­man­dant, Sgt. Ras­mussen (Roland Møller).

This plain­tive sub­ject mat­ter is but­tressed by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Camil­la Hjelm Knud­sen, who lends the image a cold and bru­tal­ly real­is­tic impres­sion. These mut­ed visu­als are sup­port­ed, and often ele­vat­ed, by a won­der­ful­ly melan­cholic score from Sune Mar­tin, which man­ages to mould a com­mend­ably dispir­it­ing atmosphere.

Despite its achieve­ments, Land of Mine is not with­out nar­ra­tive pit­falls. A char­ac­ter­is­tic sequence fea­tures a Ger­man pris­on­er res­cu­ing a Dan­ish child from an active mine­field, and this rep­re­sents just one moment in which the film shifts into exces­sive­ly sen­ti­men­talised over­tones. Clear­ly, Zand­vli­et has some­thing to say about the destruc­tive nature of war, upon both the Dan­ish land­scape and the human soul. He may not deliv­er in the sub­tlest of terms, but the end result is an admirable chron­i­cle of his­to­ry and a con­vinc­ing war drama.