Winner of this years Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Bosnian director Danis Tanović has something to be proud of. Set in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1993, during the war between Bosnian-Serbs and Muslims, No Man's Land is a tale about the ironies and intricacies of a "second marriage" gone bad, in which step children of different heritage and blood are brought together under the same household, namely the former Yugoslavia, and are suffering the effects of divorce. The film brings into full consciousness all the inner envy, differences and animosities that false siblings being held together by a strong family unit usually manage to subdue and maintain.

With the making of No Man's Land, Slovenia (along with co-producers from France, Belgium, Italy, and England) has got involved in this bold re-telling of a war that hit close to home. Basically an obscure nation in terms of cinematic accomplishment, Slovenia could very well take this opportunity to gain wider recognition as being a country worth collaborating with, not only for its poetic landscape, ideal for inexpensive location shooting, but also for its creative and resourceful film-makers and local crew.

Ljubljana Life spoke with Dunja Klemenc, one of the Slovenian-based producers of No Man's Land, about the significance of Slovenia's role in this internationally acclaimed film.

A: The producer who brought this project to us, Čedomir Kolar, my former college and closest friend from school, knew that any money brought to myself and Igor Pediček, who is my partner and owner of Studio Maj and Film Studio Casablanca, would be in good hands and that he wouldn't have to worry whether we would use the money uneconomically, or whether we'd use it in the film's best interest, because this was Tanović's debut, so this was extremely important.

A: (Laughing) Working with him was simply a pleasure. He's a young director, he was only slightly fearful at the beginning. He's a person who's come from the hell of the Bosnian war, he was on the front lines, so he was able to move past his own fears to work on the film. He didn't know whether he would be able to adequately show what was in his head. He's the kind of person who maintains the images of the film in his head, you could immediately see that with him, and in reality, he was never unsure. Maybe he didn't know some things because he'd never worked as an assistant director on a feature film and couldn't draw from experience, but he knew what he wanted, and we helped him find the right locations, of course that goes without saying. He's a very realistic person who knows what he can get and works only to get exactly that, he doesn't reach for the impossible. He was never annoying, he didn't act like a celebrity, and continued being like that on the recent shooting for his new film that we again cooperated together on, which means that we've found a good basis for a working relationship together.

A: We were involved in his last project which was made in Bosnia (shot in June 2002). For his next film, which will be an English production, we'll most likely not have any involvement. We will, however, cooperate with him as producers, where we can either act as co-producers or as executive producers again.

A: (Adamantly) No, no. For me, that film was exclusively an art film. It was a declaration of survival from someone who had survived (the war). But it was difficult to work on the film that we just shot with Danis, a short film called My September 11th, when we went to find locations in Sarajevo, Mostar and the surrounding areas. The area is still affected, and we can't forget that Yugoslavia is my homeland, and Slovenia was only a part of that... And in just 10 years... some people refer to there being a Yugo-Nostalgia, but it's not. I don't long for the bad things to come back. But I do long for the people who were good, for the things which were... Bosnia and its diversity, the seaside and its beauty, Macedonia and her beautiful songs and singing. That was a part of me, the larger part of my life. And their suffering affected me. During the war I lived with some refugees who were film crew workers who'd come to Ljubljana, whose pain was expressed extremely discretely, and if they were proud of being Bosnian, not for a moment did I hold it against them. And I took on the personal challenge to help them to find work, to be successful in Slovenia. And I succeeded and feel very lucky.

When you ask me how it affected me... when I recently went to Bosnia, I asked around for my acquaintances, friends, and people I just knew of from that area, the number of those who'd died was catastrophic, they were young, most of them were young, more young died than old, and there are some who are, at this very moment, deadly ill and are disappearing in front of our eyes. War is, of course, the worst that can happen, and those who didn't react in due time are guilty for it all.

A: No, people who are in the film business all line up in coming to Slovenia for collaboration, and we'd like to work with as many of them as possible. It's just that Slovenia has so little money in its film fund that those kinds of collaborations are small in number. At the same time, we still understand one another's languages, although the younger ones may have more difficulty, and also the cultural history that we have together was the same for 70 years. Therefore we more easily understand one another, we get along, can sing the same songs together at night, even if we don't know the words, we know the melodies, we get the point of things between one another. On No Man's Land, no one thought about what country or tribe anyone was from, people hung out together in their own film sectors, and that's to be expected.

A: Aside from Igor and myself, no one else was responsible for the shooting of the film. All other partners were involved in the financing, and arranged their own crews. The Belgians provided the Director of Photography, the Italians dealt with the editing, I only went there to have a look out of curiosity, whereas the Belgian producer didn't come at all because she had other work to do. The English producers oversaw the financing and additional funding. Otherwise, she was present during shooting because she was responsible for the two English actors, making sure they felt comfortable on the set, and of course they felt great and didn't have any special needs. We didn't have to divide up our separate functions, there was a logical division, for example since the camera was from Belgium, everything in connection to that was handled by them. Of course, the executive producer, Čedomir Kolar, had to coordinate everything and I assisted him. It was an ideal collaboration, if you work with someone for all those years, then it's easy to figure things out.

Q: So, if I've understood you correctly, Tanović first contacted Mr. Kolar?

Q: How was the shooting of Tanović's latest film different from the first?

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