Land of Mine

Martin Zandvliet's Land of Mine (Under sandet) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2017 and won the Bodil Award for Best Danish Film in 2016. The film consolidated Zandvliet, after his earlier Applause and A Funny Man, as a Danish director engaged with morally difficult historical-procedural subjects. The screenplay was based on the actual fact that approximately 2,000 German prisoners of war (including many child soldiers) were forced after the war to clear the landmines along Denmark's western coast.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Sergeant Carl Rasmussen (Roland Møller) of the Danish military is assigned to oversee a group of young German prisoners of war (many of them teenage boys conscripted in the late stages of the war) as they manually defuse the millions of landmines buried along Denmark's western coast by the Nazi occupation forces. The film follows the unit's work across several months on the windswept Jutland coastal beaches.

Camilla Hjelm Knudsen's photography of the Jutland coast (long static frames, dunes, sea, the prisoners' minimal infrastructure) produced one of the most distinctive visual registers of recent Danish cinema. The film operates simultaneously as a procedural document of historical events the Danish state had largely declined to publicly acknowledge until recent decades, and as a meditation on what occupation-aftermath justice should actually look like. The central performances of Møller and Louis Hofmann (the central young German prisoner) anchor a film that has continued to be politically consequential within Danish-German historical discourse.