Still, “Land of Mine” is an interesting addition to the growing roster of recent European films - Paul Verhoeven’s queasy “Black Book” may be the best-known example among American audiences - that search out the grayer areas of World War II and its aftermath. Their complicity with wartime horror lies beyond the film’s scope, which makes its exploration of postwar moral ambiguity feel incomplete. Zandvliet stacks the deck in making Captain Jensen as cold and sadistic as any central-casting Nazi, and in portraying the Germans as terrified, ordinary kids.

It might be easier for a viewer to forgive the victors for holding a grudge than to forgive their intended victims, however innocent and vulnerable those young men may seem. “I don’t care if you die,” he tells his young charges, who work long, hazardous shifts on the edge of starvation. Rasmussen’s hatred for his defeated enemy is boundless. In the first scene, driving his jeep past a column of retreating Germans, he pulls over to attack one who is taking home a Danish flag as a souvenir. Moller’s haunted eyes and weary countenance make it clear that his character has witnessed and suffered terrible things. Zandvliet doesn’t flash back to the sergeant’s wartime experiences. Carl Rasmussen (Roland Moller), a Clark Gable-handsome martinet with a square jaw, a neat blond mustache and very little patience. They are billeted in a shack near a coastal farm, under the command of Sgt.

That ethical tension - between justice and vengeance - is the subject of Martin Zandvliet’s “Land of Mine,” a tight and suspenseful film that is one of the five nominees for the foreign language film Oscar.įilled with picturesque, windswept shots of sand and surf, “Land of Mine” focuses on the fate of about a dozen young captives, some of whom look more like boys than fighting men. The dangerous job of clearing them was given to German prisoners of war, a punishment that seems at once intuitively fair and obviously cruel. In 1945, Germany ended its occupation of Denmark, leaving hundreds of thousands of land mines buried on the beaches of that country’s western coast.

Watch land of mine (2015) fmovies