‘Land of Mine’ a powerful slice of post-war history

A tough-looking sergeant — the type of guy you’d look at once and know not to mess with — is driving his jeep passed a long line of German prisoners of war. The Danish sergeant backs up the jeep, gets out and starts pummeling the souvenir taker in the face. [...] imagine a bunch of foreigners rolling in with tanks and imposing barbarism and inhumanity for years. Apparently, the Germans — wrongly thinking that the Allied invasion might come through Denmark — buried some two million land mines along the beaches of Denmark’s west coast. [...] following the war’s end, the British and Danes forced 2,000 German prisoners of war to locate and defuse those land mines . . . by hand. [...] here we have a horrible human situation in which we understand both points of view. [...] you have these pathetic German kids — some of them under-aged teens conscripted in the last desperate phase of the war — who are victims of Hitler almost as much as the Allies. The notion of defusing a land mine is so potent that it has become a metaphor for any delicate situation with possibly dangerous consequences. [...] realities are more intense than metaphors, and so the audience sits and shares (some of) the stress. Yet this is something curious, and a mark of the storytelling skill of writer-director Martin Zandvliet: