Beautiful People

Released 1999
Stars Charlotte Coleman, Charles Kay, Rosalind Ayres, Roger Sloman, Heather Tobias, Danny Nussbaum, Siobhan Redmond, Gilbert Martin, Nicholas Farrell, Faruk Pruti, Dado Jehan, Edin Dzandzanovic
Directed by Jasmin Dizdar

A man boards a London bus, locks eyes with another man and immediately starts to fight with him. Thrown off the bus, they chase each other through the streets and eventually end up in adjacent hospital beds, still ready to fight. One is a Croat, one is a Serb, and so they hate each other.

Ah, but hate is not limited to Croats or Serbs from Bosnia. In the next bed is the Welsh Firebomber, a man who torched the holiday cottages of 20 English weekenders before burning himself on the face. Elsewhere in "Beautiful People," we see three skinheads attacking a black kid, a foreigner who is mistaken for a thief while trying to return a wallet, and the beat goes on even at the breakfast tables of the ruling class: "God," says the wife of a government official, "Antonia Fraser is so bloody Catholic." "Beautiful People," written and directed in London by the Bosnian filmmaker Jasmin Dizdar, is about people who hate because of tribal affiliation, which is a different thing from hating somebody you know personally and have good reasons to despise.

Why are we so suspicious of one another? It may be a trait hard-wired by evolution: If you're not in my tribe, you may want to eat my dinner or steal my mate. The irony about those two Bosnian patients, fighting each other in the London hospital, is that they're the only two people in the building who speak the same language. So to speak.

Summary by Roger Ebert

"Beautiful People" is steeped in irony. It's written and directed by a Bosnian director, who wishes to express some of his experiences in Bosnia but mostly in his new home, London. He does so in a darkly comic way through several intertwining stories, and I think he has two questions he'd like answered. One is why do people hate each other based on their group affiliation (race, religion, etc.), and the other is whether it's possible to move to a new land and put your evil past behind you. In some parts of the world, it's easy for groups to pit themselves against each other based on race. In Bosnia, however, everyone is white. So they had to do it based on religion, and they've been warring for centuries. It's difficult for Americans to understand   long-standing hatreds like this that never die, because our country is only two centuries old. Also, we've continuously had new immigrants streaming in from different parts of the world at different times. This is not the case with Bosnia, which is pretty insular. The downside to that isolation is how those hatreds only deepen and can eventually turn to ethnic cleansing. We see that today in several parts of Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.

I happen to know a muslim Bosnian who moved to my small city in Minnesota, and he's a great guy. I'm very happy he was able to immigrate here and make a better life for his family. He has some horror stories to tell, such as when he was in a concentration camp for 15 months. The point of the camp was to prevent young Croats from fighting against the Serbs. I guess the good thing is they didn't just kill all of the men, but over 1000 men in his camp did die from exposure, hunger and disease. I think many of the Bosnians who've managed to leave their country hide secrets of horrors they perpetrated before leaving. Dizdar hints at this with the groom's speech at the end of the film, and I'll guarantee you'll never hear a groom's speech like this one.  --Bill Alward, October 27, 2001