The Bosnian-Serbian conflict plays out in the microcosm of a trench between enemy lines, where weathered Bosnian soldier Ciki (Branko Djuric) faces off with Serbian tenderfoot Nino (Rene Bitorajac), who looks more green and scared than Michael Jackson on his wedding night. Between them lies the Bosnian Cera (Filip Sovagovic), earlier left for dead and booby-trapped with a mine, but now recovered to find himself immobilized in the middle of a very bad day.

This all provides a dandy excuse for the war's associated hangers-on -- U.N. troops and self-serving journalists -- to descend on the scene in droves and promptly make things worse. The U.N. commanders are cardboard cutouts of incompetence who drink their tea with pinkie fingers extended and don't even seem to have the sense to plug their computers into anything. The U.N. troops, meanwhile, are French, and by the end of the movie have managed to surrender to the Serbs, the Bosnians, the Guy on the Mine, an opportunistic British journalist, a passing squirrel and a stiff breeze.

Along the way, the movie tries its hardest to impart some Important Lessons about the Futility of War. Ciki and Nino exchange the upper hand in the trench, forcing the other party at gunpoint to accept blame for starting the conflict. This attempt to share accountability equally between the two warring parties falls short because everyone knows the guilty party was in fact the Serbs. (You heard me: THE SERBS.) However, in the end, director Danis Tanovic shows us it's really the U.N. that's to blame for starting the war. Policy-makers, take note: That's the thanks you get for wading into some inscrutable civil war in a far-flung country without decent oil reserves -- instead of gratitude and a nice cake inscribed "thanks for rescuing us from gouging each other's eyes out for the next thousand years," you get blamed as the cause of all the evil in the first place. Tanovic obviously thinks the Balkans would have been better off if the U.N. had pulled out and let it turn into Rwanda.