Rosso Fango (2002)

The opening titles to this short feature would make you think you were about to watch "Gladiator". They have a choral grandiosity to them that takes too long to get us to Marcoing in France in 1918. It's the trenches at their worst as soldiers rush through the mud amidst bullets and bombs. Then two of them - one British and one German - find themselves in a crater. There's a tussle and the former stabs the latter, but not fatally. As the battle rages around them the intensity of their situation and the predicament of the noisily injured man, slowly sinking into the fetid water at the base of their hole, begins to make both appreciate their mortality, vulnerability and the futility of their actions - unless... Despite it's slow start, this builds up tensely with quite frightening use of video and sound effects and when they exchange names - remember this is 1918, it does ask quite a terrifying question!