When Jasmin Dizdar, then a 28-year-old Bosnian of the generation raised under Tito, arrived in London just before the collapse of Communism in 1989, he couldn't speak English. Having just graduated from the famed FAMU film school in Prague after winning a scholarship because of his 15 award-winning short films, and having written a thesis on the Czech director Milos Forman so highly regarded that it was published to great acclaim, the young film-maker found that he could not ask for a packet of crisps in a local newsagent's. The humiliating experience was to inspire the journey to his first feature film, Beautiful People, which inspired standing ovations and the Un Certain Regard award at this year's Cannes festival.
"I felt like an idiot; here I was, just graduated, and all I could do was point at something to get what I wanted," says Dizdar. "I managed to buy the crisps and I tried to explain to the Indian woman in the shop that I couldn't speak English. She said, `don't worry, I don't speak English either'."
Dizdar, now 38, with an ironic wit as dry as vermouth, laughs at the incident that set him thinking about the multi-ethnic communities in London and his home town of Zenica, in central Bosnia. But that was before he got married in London, on the day of the Velvet revolution, October 1989, when the Soviet Bloc collapsed, and before the lid burst on the Pandora's box of ethnic tensions that would engulf his Yugoslavian birthplace. Dizdar watched it all with his new English wife from his new home in London, the nightly reports of the horror of the Balkans that continued through to Kosovo.
But his concern was with life, not death, and the refugees who were arriving in London. An acolyte of Foreman's style (the director who won world fame with One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) with humour that emerges from sometimes terrible human experiences, he began writing a script inspired by incidents from his own life, blessed with the ability to take a sharp outsider's view of both his native country and his new home. The result was Beautiful People, a most optimistic view of the repercussions of the Balkan conflict; an episodic comedy with a large cast of experienced English actors - including Four Wedding's Charlotte Coleman and the superb Nicholas Farrell, mixed with amateur Yugoslavian emigres, playing a chain of disparate and desperate Londoners whose lives interlink through encounters with the confused Yugoslav arrivals.
"It is optimistic, but I come from there and I feel deformed, like an invalid," says Dizdar. "I'm proud of my heritage but I feel I've lost an arm and a leg, only half of me is still Yugoslavian so I don't have that baggage where I have to whip people's emotions. So when I was writing the script I enjoyed it, I was being playful, talking about serious things but being imaginative. I was able to explore important themes without being obliged to anyone. I could open everything up."
An early yearning to make films came from Dizdar's youthful criminal rebellion against the harsh drudgery of his surroundings, the heavy industrial town of Zenica where people gathered from all corners of post-war Yugoslavia to work, sleep, work and nothing else while the massive factories polluted most of Eastern Europe. When he was 10 he got "involved" with a group of young thugs who stole and resold cinema tickets. The rest, he says, "you can guess".
"I started going to see every type of film, sometimes three or four times," says Dizdar. "But it was the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns that did it for me; the composition, the music, the images just amazed me, it was like seeing your dreams. That's why I started making animation films in my kitchen when I was 16 - and maybe that's why my films have a lot of duel scenes."
Dizdar's debut feature also begins with a kind of duel, a serious-comic encounter that perfectly sets the ironic tone for his fast-moving film. On a London bus in 1993, a Serb and Croat begin to fight, the homeland wars splicing into a summer's day in England as the men tumble, kicking and punching, below a statue of Winston Churchill. They end up sharing a hospital ward with an accident-prone Welsh fire bomber; Dizdar is not afraid to point towards our own problems of nationalism and racist bigotry. But, as his film shows, he remains a great believer in the life-changing event coming from the merest chance meeting and the hope beyond the horror.
"The film is all about a chain of coincidental incidents and doesn't have a real logic but people seem to react to that, maybe that's what most people's lives are about," says Dizdar. "But what I was really trying to examine was how people find it so hard to truly connect. That's where the real war is, the incapacity to express yourself and talk to other people. It doesn't matter what language you speak."
Beautiful People opens today at the IFC
