A geographic and symbolic space characterised by borders and barriers, Europe is the site of plural cultural identities and complex multilingual interactions. Through massive events like the First and Second World Wars, the establishment of the European Union and the tense border negotiations surrounding the contemporary refugee and migrant crisis, the porosity of the European continent, the placement of its borders and the significance of its shared cultural space have evolved dramatically over the past century. Despite being a mostly unbroken land mass, continental Europe is dissected by a series of lines that have ranged from borders on a map to trenches in the ground. What constitutes the European continent, who belongs within it and who should possess the mobility to travel across it are questions that have cropped up throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such questions have been most intensely scrutinised during wartime, and are frequently broached in cinema.

Around the centenary of World War I, a number of French films have appeared which offer new frameworks for investigating the concept of Europe. These films investigate the front lines, national borders and language barriers that carved up the continent during the Great War, evoking Mireille Rosello's notion of ‘mosaic Europe’ (2012: 15). Films such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Un long dimanche de fiançailles/A Very Long Engagement (2004, France/USA) examine the brutality and tragedy of trench warfare. In Jeunet's film, warring armies fight to redraw the dividing lines between territories, and to wrest land from enemy groups. In such a context, the space between these lines, commonly known as no man's land, is an ontological void. No man's land is less identifiable as national territory and more suited to Marc Augé's concept of the non-lieu, or non-place. According to Augé, ‘if a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (1995: 77–8). The result is a space that cannot be inhabited and is characterised by a certain emptiness. In most films about trench warfare, no man's land is inherently devoid of identity and closed to constructive interaction between groups.