Sarajevo on film 2001 Bosnia and Herzegovina
No Man's Land (Ničija zemlja)
The Oscar-winning black comedy set in a trench between two armies — a Bosnian film by a director who served in the army that defended Sarajevo.
- Director
- Danis Tanović
- Year
- 2001
- Runtime
- 98 minutes
- Language
- Bosnian
- Country
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Genre
- war, drama
No Man’s Land is not set in Sarajevo; it is set in a trench in the no-man’s-land between a Bosnian and a Serbian line, and that distinction is the point. The film opens with a small group of Bosnian soldiers walking the wrong way in fog and walking into a Serbian ambush. When the fog clears, two survivors are trapped in a trench with a wounded comrade who is lying on a bouncing mine — the moment he shifts, all three of them die. The rest of the film is the absurd, increasingly farcical negotiation over that single patch of ground: two armies, UN peacekeepers, a TV camera, and a man who cannot move.
Danis Tanović made it after serving in the Bosnian army during the siege of Sarajevo, where he recorded the front-line sound he later used in the film. The black humour is the humour of people who have been through the real thing — the same register as the city’s wartime jokes, aimed at the absurdity rather than at any victim. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002, the first (and still the only) Bosnian film to win an Oscar.
For a visitor, it is the war’s logic in one concentrated dose: the front lines that ran through apartment blocks and the international apparatus that watched. It is the film to see before the siege museums, because it explains the fog.
Critical reception
No Man’s Land won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002 — still the only Bosnian film to do so — plus a Golden Globe, a European Film Award for best screenplay, and the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes. It holds a 93% Tomatometer and a Metacritic score of 84.
Public reception and legacy
No Man’s Land remains Bosnia’s only Academy Award, the first in the country’s history, and it holds a 93% critics’ and 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a worldwide box office of just under $5 million — a figure dwarfed by its place in the national culture. It also took the audience award at the 2001 Sarajevo Film Festival. In August 2026, a digitally restored 4K version had its world premiere as the closing film of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival — twenty-five years after the original premiered at the same festival. The restoration was screened in the Open Air programme on 21 August 2026 (per SFF official announcement).
What the critics said
“It's a bleakly funny parable that could be titled 'Between Enemy Lines.'”Read the review →
Portrait: Sound Opinions · CC BY-SA 2.0
“The film is curiously beautiful.”Read the review →
Portrait: Sound Opinions · CC BY-SA 2.0