The sergeant really represents all the sergeants on the west coast, where some were evil and some good. The fictionalized character is the sergeant who at first starves the young boys and treats them harshly, but eventually finds his humanity and comes to care for them. In the beginning many of the POWs didn’t get food, lived in terrible places.” “We know how many mines there were, and who died,” he said. Zandvliet fictionalized this true story, balancing dramatic tricks with facts and numbers.
See more Buying or Selling a Movie at Sundance is More Complicated Than Ever I walked around a cemetery looking for the German names, then suddenly I saw that the Germans were very young. “Every country has its own demons that no one wants to let out, even in Denmark. “I was looking for the dark chapters of our country,” he said in a phone interview. The story began when Zandvliet started digging into the ways that Denmark broke the Geneva Convention. For every 5,000 defused mines, one soldier was killed. “Land of Mine” follows a hard-nosed Sergeant (Roland Møller), who after five years of brutal occupation by Germany, commands a troop of German POWs, some as young as 13, to use their bare hands to defuse land mines buried in beach sand. “And you never know what to expect in terms of awards … Unfortunately this small, local story feels more global and more relevant than ever.”Īt the end of the war in 1945, more than 2,000 German POWs were forced to remove over 1.5 million land mines from the west coast of Denmark. “It’s an amazing year for world cinema,” said Zandvliet, who also edits documentaries. The result was “Land of Mine,” a well-reviewed but controversial box office hit in Scandinavia and Europe that scored three European Film Awards on the way to a coveted Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. Finding a new way in was the challenge for Danish writer-director Martin Zandvliet (“Applause”).