Jasmin Dizdar

Jasmin Dizdar (born 8 June 1961) is a British-Bosnian film director, screenwriter and author known for his feature film Beautiful People and his World War Two thriller Chosen. Jasmin Dizdar also published a book on cinema, which sold over 50,000 copies.

Early life
Jasmin Dizdar was born and grew up in his Bosnian hometown of Zenica. With the guidance and encouragement of his primary school literature teacher, he sent his short story “History Hour” to a regional competition and won his first award for the best short story.

During his time at secondary school, he was an actor in the Bosnian theatre play Hanka, based on the novel by Isak Samokovlija, as well as being adapted for the 1955 film Hanka directed by Yugoslav film director Slavko Vorkapić. The play premiered in Zenica's Old National Theatre.

As a teenager, Jasmin Dizdar joined a local film club where he wrote, edited and directed numerous short documentary, drama and experimental films and began to take interest in film theory, particularly Russian structuralist film theory. His last Bosnian film Butterfly Dance (featuring an ensemble cast from Zenica's National Theatre) got him into the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czech Republic.

Career


Jasmin Dizdar studied film directing at the Prague film school FAMU. His movies were known for utilising satirical humour, often casting ordinary people, Czech actors and filmmakers who were not favored by the communist regime. Czech film director Elmar Klos gave Grand Jury prize to Dizdar's graduation film After Silence. This student film is preserved as a national treasure in the Czech national film archive.

During his film studies, Jasmin Dizdar wrote about director Miloš Forman, who was a fellow FAMU alumni banned by the state. His friendship with Czech cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek and film critic Eva Zaoralova led to the publishment of Dizdar’s book about Forman, Audition for a Director. The book was published in a record number of fifty thousand copies.

After graduating from university with a Red Diploma, Dizdar spent some time in France before settling in the United Kingdom where he wrote a number of screenplays for BBC Television and a radio play for BBC Radio 4.

1999 saw the release of the feature film Beautiful People. Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport visited the Cannes Film Festival world premier of Beautiful People where the film received a ten-minute standing ovation. The film won an award for the best film in Un Certain Regard category at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, an audience award "Gold Gryphon" at Saint-Petersburg International Festival of Festivals, and many other international awards. Jasmin Dizdar became the second Bosnian filmmaker to win a major award at the Cannes Film Festival - the first being Emir Kustkurica in 1985 - and the first Bosnian filmmaker from Zenica to do so.

After its success at the Cannes Film Festival, distributors in over 30 countries purchased the rights to Beautiful People, further spreading the movie's popularity. Dizdar described Beautiful People as a movie that "embraces every emotion, which is why people all around the world have embraced it." After Beautiful People was screened for several weeks around the world, alongside Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, Robert Altman’s Cookie's Fortune and Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, Dizdar exclaimed during an interview with his friend, world-music renowned BBC Radio London DJ, Charlie Gillett: “Film directors like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman and Pedro Almodóvar standing shoulder to shoulder with me in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo makes my teenage dream come true. If a car were to hit me now, I’d die a happy man.”

Following Beautiful People, Jasmin Dizdar wrote and directed a segment for the French feature film Les Européens (2006), discussing the social topic of refugees finding various ways to enter Europe. Jasmin Dizdar's segment is about an African refugee who tries to smuggle himself into Europe by stowing away in the landing-gear bay of a passenger plane that departs from North Africa. When the landing-gear bay opens as the plane makes its descent, he tumbles out from a few thousand feet over Rome and falls on the car-roof of a middle-class religious woman who begins to believe that the refugee is a gift from God.

Jasmin Dizdar’s following feature film Chosen (2016) starring Harvey Keitel, Ana Ularu and Luke Mably is a drama set during the Second World War and tells the story of a young lawyer who uses a ploy to fight the Nazis to save thousands of lives. Keitel plays the lawyer in present-day New York, USA.

Personal life
As an adolescent, Jasmin Dizdar discovered that his paternal grandparents were murdered by Nazis during the Second World War. A post-war orphanage changed his father's original surname from Dizdar to Dizdarević. After thirty years of living under the surname Dizdarević, he took back his grandfather’s original surname Dizdar.

Jasmin Dizdar currently lives in London where he has been residing since 1989, and is a UK citizen since 1993. He has a daughter who is also a filmmaker and visual artist.

Filmography

 * Butterfly Dance (1984)
 * Mr Slave (1985)
 * Crucifixion (1986)
 * Heroes Will Be Heroes (1987)
 * After Silence (1988)
 * Our Sweet Homeland (1989)
 * Beautiful People (1999)
 * Les Europeens (2006)
 * Chosen (2016)

Other works

 * Horseman (BBC, 1992) - television drama
 * Intimate Tragedy (BBC, 1994) - radio drama
 * Miloš Forman Audition for a Director