It was selected and nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 89th Academy Awards. It was shown in the Platform section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. 'Under the Sand') is a 2015 Danish-German historical drama war film directed by Martin Zandvliet.
And though the progress of the story is not hard to guess, ‘Land of Mine’ is still deeply engrossing from scene to scene. Land of Mine ( Danish: Under sandet, lit. If you are the kind of person freaked out by sudden loud noises, consider yourself warned, there’s some nail-chewing tension in store. If Americans think of Denmark during the German occupation, from the April 1940 invasion to the Victory in Europe Day of May 8, 1945, they probably only recall the citizen effort that helped most of the Jews escape the 1943 Nazi roundup. After the end of hostilities, the job of clearing the mines was tasked to German prisoners of war.Īt the heart of the story here is a bad-ass Danish sergeant (Roland Møller), who’s none too chuffed at supervising a bunch of scared German teenage conscripts in this perilous but necessary task. Joel Basman and Louis Hofmann in Land of Mine. Martin Zandvliet’s film is the painful story of a group of German teenage prisoners forced to demine the beaches of Denmark at the end of the Second World War.
In post-World War II Denmark, a group of young German POWs are forced to clear a beach of thousands of land mines under the watch of a Danish Sergeant who slowly learns to appreciate their plight. With Roland Mller, Louis Hofmann, Joel Basman, Mikkel Boe Flsgaard. For a long time I have been extolling the virtues of Antony Beevor’s historical tome detailing the Battle of Stalingrad (Stalingrad, Penguin Books).As that particular battle was close to being lost, over 100,000 soldiers, mostly teenagers at that point, could have been airlifted to safety before they were officially captured. During the war, the Nazis, incorrectly guessing that the Allies would try to invade Germany via Denmark’s west coast, laid more than two million landmines along the shoreline. Land of Mine: a dark chapter in Danish history. Land of Mine: Directed by Martin Zandvliet. Land of Mine (Denmark) Directed by Martin Zandvliet. This Oscar-nominated Danish drama brings a little-known slice of post-WWII history to the screen with a combination of visceral punch, sombre reflection and compassion.