Land Of MIne * * * * 1/2

This excellent drama is set in Denmark at the end of WWII.  

    During the occupation the Germans had planted over two million land mines on the Danish beaches to discourage an allied invasion.

Not exactly a fun day at the beach.

    That’s a lot of land mines to have to clean up at the end of the war, and who better to do it than the German POW’s? Which sounds fair and reasonable, except the POW's that were forced to do this were teenage boys who had been conscripted in the final months of the war. Frightened, cold, homesick, hungry, ill trained, they had to crawl on their bellies, searching for buried mines square centimeter by square centimeter. Then they had to dig them up and defuse them.

     The film focuses on a Danish army sergeant who is put in charge of  fourteen of these German lads and given a length of shoreline to get cleaned up over three months.  He starts off having no sympathy for them and treats them brutally.  But despite his sternness the sergeant begins to see what we see - they might have once been the enemy, but as boys they are no less victims of this dreadful war than anyone else.  We begin to share his moral dilemma. We feel sorry for them but who else should be assigned to clean up the mess?

     Nearly all the drama is set on the beach and in the hut the boys have to stay in.

     As most of  the prisoners are still in ragged uniforms  I often found it hard to tell one from the other. Maybe it would be clearer if you could speak German or Danish?  But it didn’t greatly matter to me.   It was is as though the many are representative of one, and the one of the many.

    It is a true story and one that makes for a simple but extremely tense drama.