Hundreds of movies have been made about the horrors of war, but few filmmakers have seen those horrors firsthand. Bosnian writer/director Danis Tanovic was studying film when the war in Bosnia erupted, but instead of taking up arms, he picked up his camera and went to document the conflict. Yet after the war ended Tanovic had trouble returning to the life he once knew.
“You can imagine how the experience of war can make you feel,” Tanovic says. “I wasn’t thriving so much as just living, being for most of the time like a zombie. Then I met my wife and started to appreciate life again. I wanted to do something with the experience I had.”
Tanovic’s first feature film “No Man’s Land” won the Best Screenplay award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and this past March won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the Academy Awards. Now that it’s been released on DVD, the film can be seen by an even wider audience, many of whom might be surprised at Tanovic’s darkly humorous take on war.
“I needed a few years of distance to be able to write it. I was too emotional and I didn’t want to do it while I was emotional. What I wanted to show was the absurdity of war,” Tanovic says. “Humor, somehow, is the right weapon with which to do that. There was a lot of humor during the war, because humor is what helps you survive. It’s like a way out. That’s how it functions in the film.”
“No Man’s Land” is set almost entirely in a trench on the front lines of the Bosnian-Serb fighting. Stuck in the trench are three soldiers, one Bosnian, one Serb and one fallen fighter who will explode if he’s moved off of a pressure-triggered landmine. Tanovic chose to stress the drama and comedy over action. When it came time to replicate battle, he found that his wartime experience came in handy.
“The guy who came to make the explosions on my set was making explosions like it was 1914,” Tanovic says with a chuckle. “I had to explain to him how to make a modern explosion until I got the effect I wanted. But in my movie I don’t have much blood. I wanted it to be more of a drama, like Beckett’s `Waiting for Godot’ set in Bosnia.”
“No Man’s Land” paints a vivid and memorable portrait of a conflict many Americans might only know from newspaper accounts, which puts Tanovic in the proud tradition of other filmmaking ambassadors. “I took good care of the details, because I was there and I know what it looks like,” Tanovic says.
It’s often the destructive power of war that results in the creation of great art. “It’s not by chance that after the Second World War or the First World War or all of the other big wars that you had people with something to say,” Tanovic says. “Suddenly, they’ve seen life from another angle. But you don’t have to live through a war to make a movie about it, thank God. I don’t think Dante was in hell, but he wrote a very good book about it.”
“But how important is art, anyway?” asks Tanovic, his war-bred cynicism showing. “I don’t think there is a real answer to that question. For me, art is important, and there is nothing that makes me happier than to see a good movie or read a good book or view a great painting. It’s a private answer for each one of us.”
