Laughter is the best weapon

Few war films these days are born of first-hand experience. Fewer still have the nerve to portray terrible events with a seasoning of pungent black comedy. A rare exception is No Man's Land, set in Bosnia in 1993, where two soldiers, a Serb and a Croat, find themselves trapped in the same trench, triggering an international crisis which involves the foreign news corps and some ineffectual UN peacekeepers. Not since M*A*S*H (to which this has been widely compared) has a film sunk its teeth into war's absurdities with quite such relish.

Since emerging in Cannes last year as one of the festival's most exciting surprises, No Man's Land has notched up a list of trophies, culminating in the Best Foreign Film Oscar in March. It has been a spectacular movie debut for the 33-year-old writer-director, Danis Tanovic.

A former war photographer for the Bosnian army, Tanovic is fiercely intelligent and good-looking in a burly, slightly battered way, with a gravelly voice and an unnerving, burning gaze. "Comedy was our secret weapon during the war," he says.

"When you can't cope with a situation, either you go mad or you find something to release that energy. Bosnian humour is very similar to English humour. My top cult comedy is Monty Python - I don't think you realise its international influence. It should be protected by Unesco."

Tanovic was studying film at the University of Sarajevo when a grenade exploding out-side his house unceremoniously announced the opening of hostilities. "There was no Bosnian army. I went to the local police station and asked what I could do. They put me with four other guys patrolling up and down the street waiting for the tanks to come. With no guns." He whistles in derision. It seems that some of the farcical situations he devised in No Man's Land did not require any great leap of the imagination.

He joined a special-forces unit. "Then I realised there was nobody filming the conflict and that the camera is as strong as any gun. That was my way of fighting this war and I think it saved me somehow. I had the feeling I was doing something important. Funny when you think about it now."

Tanovic's camera took him to "the most terrifying things and the most beautiful things. I was always close to what was happening." Asked what he remembers most, he hesitates, eventually selecting, among the many options, the sight of a six-month-old baby lying in his cot after losing both his parents and both his legs. "It was all pictures, just sadness and pain." Some of his footage went to Bosnian television, which fed it to the international media. Some was eventually used as evidence against Milosevic at the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

Strangely, No Man's Land, opening next week, is often lovely to look at. Shot in high summer, in a lush green landscape, it's an intimate, dramatic piece with none of the muck and bullets and swarming soldiers one expects of a war movie. "Bosnia was not like that. Fighting is a big word for what we were doing. We were struggling to survive. And people always talk about Sarajevo but the whole of Bosnia was at war. My country is beautiful. Parts of it could be Provence."

Tanovic fled Bosnia in 1994, exhausted, emaciated and at the end of his tether. He went to Belgium, where he resumed his studies, met his wife and eventually took out dual nationality. Where does he live now?

He heaves a mighty, philosophical sigh. "That is the question. Recently, I've spent three months in Slovenia, three in Italy, two in Bosnia, two in the United States, two in France and two in Belgium. As a film director, you're a gipsy. It's not a job, it's a way of life."