No man's Land is a film about all that can go wrong with relationships forged for political means rather than through love, and the inner battle that victims of circumstance face when being forced to choose between the maintenance of human integrity, compassion and dialogue… or the explosive expression of hatred, vengeance and punishment.

The average ex-pat viewer may be surprised to find that this film is not your average, blood-happy war movie whose scenes are predominantly melodramatic reconstructions of the violence and atrocities that we've all seen on the news time and time again. No, this film goes deeper. It delves into the psyche of this unfathomably complex issue between estranged step-brothers and – unlike most Hollywood war films whose ultimate message always seems to amount to patriotic hogwash that attempts to convince us that we’re somehow better than the enemy – it doesn’t try to point the finger at any one side. In fact, it makes all sides: Bosnian, Serb, and especially the UN troops (who represent the West), seem more or less ridiculous, childish, and tragically lost in roles they somehow must play because that’s the hand that’s been dealt to them.

By portraying characters who are naive, fed-up, victimized by their own government, culture, upbringing, and circumstances, we witness and empathize with their fight for survival against an unpredictable enemy who could easily have been the schoolmate of an old girlfriend, or a stranger who comes in the name of peace to "help", but with whom one can hardly communicate due to a language barrier and a lack of understanding of the other’s culture, beliefs, temperament, and basic human identity.

The main characters are soldiers who are forced into an absurd battle to keep a land that belongs not to Serbs nor to Bosnians but to Mother Earth, and to fight against one’s brother, albeit "step", from a marriage that was political yet had managed to last for generations as a charmingly exotic and intricate mixture of family values and cultural habits, with a peaceful common identity which was known proudly as "Yugoslav". The Blue Helmets are stationed as peace-keepers but have no autonomous authority, nor any real means to do what they are there for.

These enemies, somehow trapped in a situation where it pays to fight to keep an ironic fine-line of personal integrity (they shoot one another, but not to kill) and make a vein but honest attempt at human decency (they continually spare one another’s lives and try to save a condemned man from his fate), make a moving attempt to escape from damnation and walk out of their no man's land to freedom. Isn't that what we would all seek?

In the end, we are left with a tale about humans, their fight to survive and maintain as blameless as possible a position in an impossible war – while the rest of the world did little to stop the abandonment of the anonymous souls who were swallowed up by a no-man’s land.