That's where director Kathryn Bigelow expects to see her movie "The Hurt Locker" when it's out on DVD. Right next to "They Were Expendable," or "Hell is for Heroes," or other movies about men in combat.

"This is a war movie," she says. "It's not a reintegration to the home front movie. If you go down to Blockbuster, this will not be on the I'm-coming-home-and-can't-cope-with-life-shelf. This will be on the war shelf."

"The Hurt Locker" is set in Iraq, but its unwavering, you-are-there, front-line focus makes it different than most other Iraq war dramas, which tend to focus on the psychological toll of war on soldiers, friends and family.

Bigelow's movie also concentrates on a different kind of soldier - borrowing a phrase from journalist Chris Hedges, she says her characters are men for whom "war is a force that gives them meaning."

The project had its origins with journalist/screenwriter Mark Boal's embedment a few years ago with members of the Army's Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit on duty in Baghdad. Bigelow says EOD is the most dangerous, thankless job in the army, with the highest mortality rate.

"I know that Mark went over there fully expecting, at least to some extent, to find the sort of disgruntled soldier we all know from the Vietnam era. That's not what he found, not at all," Bigelow says.

Instead, Boal found the EOD guys to be uncommonly bright, focused, dedicated and almost ferociously competent.

"For Mark, that encounter was startling."

The more he learned about them, the less startled he became, Bigelow says.

"It's important to understand that these guys are invited in EOD. They're selected based on their intelligence, their extraordinary motor skills, their ability to make life and death decisions under circumstances of extreme pressure," she adds.

For Boal, it was paramount to capture these attributes in the script. It was those very elements that made Bigelow jump at a chance to direct the movie, an independent shot on a low-ish budget in and around Amman, Jordan (It found a U.S. distributor in about ten seconds after its Toronto debut).

For Bigelow, it was important to find a way to bring audiences into the Iraq war, maybe for the first time.

"The conflict can be sort of abstract to people, with all of these acronyms - IED, EOD - I wanted an up close and personal look at what it all means," she says. "And this project was perfect. As an embed with EOD, Mark was at the epicenter of combat. The Iraq war isn't the traditional ground-to-ground, air-to-air, let's take that hill war. It's in the middle of city, in dense populations, against an invisible enemy who's hiding objects buried underneath a rubble pile in an empty rice bag. However you can imagine hiding a bomb, they've done it."

Most of what ends up in "The Hurt Locker" is a version of something Boal witnessed in Iraq.

"It began as reporting, and I wanted it to remain reportorial," Bigelow says. "The conflict is ongoing, so, obviously, there is the desire to make it as real and authentic as possible. You have a responsibility to do so. It was very important to both of us to keep it rigorously real."

In a way, that made her job easier, since there was no need for acrobatic camerawork and snazzy angles to embellish the scenes.

"We're filming Jeremy removing a blasting cap from [an unexploded shell], and my heart is pounding," she says. "Now, I'm in Amman, I'm not in Baghdad, no harm will come my way, and there's nothing to be afraid of other than the heat, and, yet, I'm terrified. It's not material that needs a lot of help."

Critics believe otherwise and have praised Bigelow for finding ways to bend her natural gift for action (her credits include "Point Break") to the task of a realistic Iraq war movie.

"That's what I responded to. The opportunity to show people where the war lives. It's an experiential, boots-on-the-ground movie. You're taking that lonely walk." *