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He tackles these themes in a way that is both effective and conventional. Zandvliet is less interested in the stark battle between good and evil than in the shifting ground of power and responsibility, and the way that every person carries the potential for decency and depravity.
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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.
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“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 this situation, the townsfolk may get a true picture of what it means to be a coward or a hero.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. When the supposed saboteur is discovered and shot by the Nazis, Albert gets caught in the middle, with his life on the line. If he is unable, he will not hesitate to imprison and execute innocent people to make them examples to the townsfolk. As such, von Keller is determined to find out the person or people behind these acts. In addition, an act of sabotage at the railway yard which was intended to thwart the Nazis resulted in two German soldiers being killed. Someone or some faction in town has been clandestinely printing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. Albert is secretly in love with Louise, which most in town know, it being more of a joke to them than anything as they know he will never admit such in his cowardice. Louise's fellow schoolteacher, middle-aged Albert Lory, is a timid man, his self-admitted cowardice exacerbated by his overbearing mother, Emma Lory, coddling him, she in return expecting that he never leave her. On the other side, the school head master, well-respected Professor Sorel, and young schoolteacher Louise Martin, Paul's sister and George's fiancée, openly but quietly resist although do not totally defy Nazi orders. Paul Martin, a railway switch man and George's best friend, has gone even further by befriending occupying German soldiers. Some of the town's leading citizens, such as Mayor Henry Manville and the railway station master George Lambert, encourage that citizen cooperation outwardly to maintain peace, while such persons are able to profit individually in being in von Keller's proverbial back pocket.
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#IMDB LAND OF MINE FREE#
Like other such occupied towns, the Nazis are keeping it a supposed free city in return for citizen cooperation. The Nazis have just invaded and are now occupying another Western European town in an Allied country, the Nazi District Commadant being Major Erich von Keller.