Land of Mine

Land of Mine (Under sandet, 2015) is a Danish-German war drama you can watch online on iFILM. Germany has just surrendered, and the western beaches of Denmark hide more than two million mines. The job of digging them out falls to captured German teenagers.

Sergeant Rasmussen is put in charge of a handful of boys who were copying each other's homework not long ago. On their knees in the sand, bare hands on the detonators, they clear the coast one fuse at a time, promised home once the beach is safe. Rasmussen starts out hating every one of them. Day by day, as the boys die, the enemy in front of him stops looking like soldiers and starts looking like frightened kids. Louis Hofmann and Roland Møller carry it without a false beat.

Director Martin Zandvliet built an almost unbearable film around a corner of history that rarely gets told: what a victorious country does with prisoners once the shooting stops. It was a nominee for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Quiet, brutal, no heroics. Stream Land of Mine (2015) online on iFILM.