We sit down with Leeds-born Writer and Director Darren Statman to find out all about his award-winning short film Land Mine.
Land Mine is a short drama film telling the story of Samuel, who returns to Poland to his family’s farm after the horrors he has en- dured in the Bergen–Belsen concentration camp. He finds the farm inhabited by Piotr, a labourer who is now running a moonshine business from the farm. The farm is a prize for Piotr, who sees himself as the rightful heir to the farm and the surrounding land. Samuel’s disrupting of Piotr’s newfound equilibrium results in escalating violence and reignites past traumas and painful buried memories for both Samuel and his aggressor.
“It’s about a kid who is the only member of his family to survive the concentration camps,” Writer Darren Statman explains. “He returns home to his family’s farm, and we don’t know initially why he’s come back, apart from that he’s come back because of PTSD. He finds that the farm has been taken over by this labourer who worked for the family. For this labourer, Piotr, his life has been disturbed by Samuel showing up and wanting back what Piotr feels is rightly his. It accelerates into quite a violent story, with a horrifically shocking ending.”
The film’s affecting nature has won it two prestigious awards: Best Drama Short at the London Independent Film Awards and Best Drama Short at the Berlin Indie Film Festival: “I’m very low-key about things. We’ve entered into a few festivals, and really the film has only been showing for the past month, so the paint is just drying on it. It’s very nice to win an award, and you always hope that people respond to the film. It’s a very difficult story. It’s a story that’s very apt currently; it reflects what is going on in Ukraine as well. Ultimately, it’s a film about survival.”
Despite Darren’s Jewish background and the focus of the film around a concentration camp survivor, he doesn’t consider the film a Jewish film: “I wouldn’t call it an overtly Jewish film at all. There’s no mention of a specific religious background, because we know that fact that Samuel has come out of Belsen, and the only line that alludes to that is: ‘Are you the only one to come back?’ There’s no time to stand there doing long-winded speeches. I didn’t think that was particularly realistic with the kind of people this story is about.”
In fact, the film contains very little dialogue, with only one character, Piotr, speaking at all: “Once I’d established the laws of the film, it made incredible sense, because then I had to rely on just visual sto- rytelling. It works because I knew what the beginning and end scene was, and I knew what I wanted to say with it.”
Telling such an impactful tale in just 20 minutes is no easy feat, but judging by the acclaim Land Mine is receiving, Darren has certainly accomplished it.
