TORONTO -- For Danis Tanovic, No Man's Land is not just a film. It's a real place. It's his country.

During the Bosnian War, Tanovic, who was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, watched his country self destruct capturing the horror first as a documentary filmmaker and last year as the writer and director of the powerful dramatic allegory No Man's Land.

His film won a Golden Globe for best foreign language film and has been nominated in the same category for an Oscar.

Tanovic started his film career as a Bosnian army cameraman.

He filmed more than 300 hours of archival footage of the siege of Sarajevo. "I was 23 years old. I had a camera. I was foolish and I believed I was invincible.

"I honestly didn't know enough to be afraid," says Tanovic. "A lot of my film made it on the world news. Now, when I see some of that footage, it makes me ill.

"At the time, I felt removed from the actual horror because I was viewing it through a camera and it didn't seem as real."

In order to give movie audiences a glimpse of the futility he observed, Tanovic wrote No Man's Land, which opens at the Uptown Theatre tomorrow.

It's a fable about a Bosnian soldier (Branko Djuric) and a Serb soldier (Rene Bitorajac) who find themselves trapped in a trench between their warring armies.

"This is not a film about guilt or blame. It is a movie about the futility of war and of how our war in particular was reported by the international media."

Tanovic chose to make a much more intimate movie that explores the paradox of people who are so similar audiences will have difficulty telling the two heroes apart, yet they feel entirely different and alienated.

When the Bosnian war ended, Tanovic moved to Belgium to study filmmaking. He now lives in Paris. In September of 1999, Tanovic delivered his screenplay for No Man's Land to the offices of Noe Productions in Paris.

"Three days later, Marc Baschet (of Noe Productions) called me and within five days I had five producers lined up behind the project. That's how fast things came together for me."

Tanovic completed editing his film three days before it was scheduled to appear at the Canne Film Festival last May.

A month later he showed it in Sarajevo in an outdoor arena before 2,500 people.

Bitorajac says he and his fellow actors "were pretty certain the film would do well in our countries but we never expected the kind of response we got that day in Sarajevo.

"The audience was cheering for my (Bosnian) character.

"At the end of the film they applauded the actor Rene, not his character, so it was an incredible validation for all of us."


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