Danis Tanovic
No Man's Land

"Hell is only something created by our minds." (Danis Tanovic)

Goran Bregovic, citizen and artist of the world, was born from an act of love in Sarajevo, Bosnia, to a Serbian mother and a Croatian father.

When I first heard about him, I was no longer very young and had already fled. Somewhere, in the eastern part of Croatia, in some player, it played like in a theater full of sadness, for a long-forgotten show - so I took the train and reached him. At the entrance of Vukovar there was an enormous cement garage razed to the ground: in those years the Yugo was the trendy car, they called it the American deux-chevaux because it was very successful in America just before the same bombed its factory in Kragujevac.

I slept in Osijek, in the arms of my own tragedy, while Bregovic played in a theater full of hope: at the entrance of Osijek they were all bread sellers and at the cinema, they were showing "No Man's Land", a tram started slowly and by the end credits had toured the country. A gift from the Czechs to the victory of dissident Václav Havel against the communists. The old still called it The Capital, and forgot that Slavonia was conquered, and in the evening the young would dive into the tributaries of the Danube. I - who at twenty-four was no longer young - reached the Danube consciously and failure.

"No man's land", no man's land. Where only plucked trees and yellowish stones rise, like the soul of one who no longer knows which war to fight if he doesn’t even truly know his own.

A few centuries later, that is now, I go to the park to distinguish war from peace among pigeons, nothing from nothing, and now that I've tried everything I've ended up where I started: drinking myself to death trying to figure out if I feel at peace. I open the newspaper and the Evening Standard section is called "Is this you?": every morning a photo at the exit of Victoria Station circles a face among millions and if you recognize yourself you win - frightening faces, non-faces ruined by eternal survival, twisted beasts, semi-alive, children unable to recognize themselves in the mirror and for this reason, no one ever wins in the "Is this you?" section; dogs always headed to the same place, destroyed by the lack of dramas and I sit and watch them, also because I have nowhere to go.

Compared to the hundreds of films of this genre, "No man's land" introduces a previously unknown element in war cinematography: at the end of the avalanche of blows the good guys don't win, simply because it's unclear who the hell they might be. Chiki, Nino, and Cera are the faces of all the men who fight: frightening faces, non-faces ruined by eternal hatred, unable to recognize each other and thus no one ever wins in war; dogs in battle always in different places, blinded by the search for drama and I sit and feed on it, also because I've drunk everything and I have nothing left to eat.

The three protagonists as well as their superiors, colonels, state hierarchs, the bureaucracy, the superior politics; all together in a film that is a reflection of it in no man's land.

At 11:50 PM the train from Trieste to Belgrade departs. In winter I would get off in Zagreb with the ice: there was a small fountain, at the end of one side of the station, right next to the pile of drunk Bosnians and that of garbage; from Zagreb, I would move eastward, along something that seemed close to nothingness for endless stations, and all the times I couldn't believe the man who shared my compartment (that man with a face devastated by an earthquake, who had got stuck on the same word, "Da, da, da"), I couldn't believe that he would eventually disappear from my life.

Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 2001, No Man's Land is a beautiful representation of reason, simply because there are infinite wars but reason doesn't exist if there is more than one.