Scornful of the Germans for their five-year occupation of his country, and with the intent on punishing what is left of the Nazi regime, the bullish Sergeant Rasmussen (Roland Møller) marches his squad out on the dunes each day to prod for mines. These young German POWs Sebastian, Helmut, Ludwig, twins Ernst and Werner, and Wilhelm have confusion, fear and defeat in their eyes. Zandvliet sheds light on this historical tragedy as the entry point to a story that involves love, hate, revenge and reconciliation. During this process, more than half of them were killed or severely wounded.
With minimal or no training in defusing explosives, they were sent to remove in excess of two million of their own landmines from the Danish west coast. In the days following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945, German POWs held in Denmark were put to work by the Allied Forces. The explosions are terrible, and so is everything else left behind by war.Land of Mine, the stunning new film from Danish director Martin Zandvliet, exposes the previously hidden story of Denmark's darkest hour. But its steel-blue skies and dispassionate view of men clinging pointlessly to masculine codes do get under your skin. (Some is connected to his own small daughter, who plays a child living near the beach our boys are clearing.) The sometimes manipulative film is perhaps too opaque regarding its own moral context. Rasmussen can’t keep up his hardass thing forever, of course, and writer-director Martin Zandvliet works a little too hard to add conflict to an already sufficiently tense setting. The other youngsters to stick out are softhearted twins (Emil and Oskar Belton) and a slightly older soldier (Joel Basman) seemingly more tainted by their Nazi upbringing. And they have a natural leader in blond, blue-eyed Sebastian (Louis Hoffman). Obviously, they lose some rookies right away, but the sergeant’s hungry group is lucky to have a mine map. This and his perfect command of the German language put him in charge of the exceptionally youthful squad, quickly taught the lethal basics of finding and defusing mines. Rasmussen (the excellent Roland Møller) has an almost sadistic hatred of the former occupiers.
Younger soldiers form the centre of this tense, Oscar-nominated tale, although they are commanded by a Danish resistance fighter, a hardened sergeant wearing (without explanation) the uniform of a British paratrooper.įor reasons not divulged-nor do they need to be-Sgt. Stragglers were dragooned into cleaning up this ordnance-a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, but containing a certain rough justice for a brutalized population. The Danish-German coproduction Land of Mine (the original title translates more poetically as Under the Sand) focuses on a forgotten coda, with German conscripts forced by Danish authorities to remove and defuse millions of mines left behind on the beaches of Denmark, where an Allied invasion was mistakenly anticipated in 1944.īy the time the Wehrmacht retreated the following spring, most new recruits were either old men or teenage boys. Untold stories are now as rare as the unexploded land mines left behind more than 70 years after the end of World War II. In German and Danish, with English subtitles. The aptly titled Land of Mine was Denmark’s Oscar-nominated entry in the best foreign language film category, and it’s a spellbinding horror story that’s all the more frightening.