- Born
- Birth nameJasmin Dizdarevic
- Nickname
- Jazz
- Height6′ 5″ (1.96 m)
- Jasmin Dizdar is a British-Bosnian film director and screenwriter best known for his feature film Beautiful People (1999) and World War Two thriller Chosen (2016), staring Harvey Keitel. Both ironic and entirely sincere, Dizdar directs in a style that combines realism with a playful imagination. The screen hums with rapid cuts and inventive uses of subtext, performances and kinetics addressing the fundamental ridiculousness of war, prejudice, collective indifference and pleasure of being alive.
Jasmin Dizdar was born and grew up in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, former Yugoslavia. As a child, he was an award winning short-story writer. During his adolescent years, he became prolific cinema-goer and amateur actor, before joining the film club in his hometown Zenica (Bosnia) where he made fifteen short films, winning himself eleven awards.
After six years of short filmmaking in his home-town, Zenica, he began his film studies at the internationally acclaimed film school FAMU in Prague, Czechoslovakia. It's alumni included internationally renowned filmmakers such as; Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, Emir Kusturica and Agnieszka Holland. Jasmin's two graduation films, After Silence (1987) and Our Sweet Homeland (1988), both won awards at the student film festivals and his dissertation about film director Miloš Forman, "Audition for a Director", was published as a book in Prague in 1990. During his final years as a FAMU student, he was already living in London, writing his first screenplay "Mummy is Dead" in English.
The BBC commissioned him to write the TV drama "Horseman", before commissioning him to write a radio play "Intimate Tragedy", soon after. Then the British Film Institute commissioned him to write the screenplay for his first feature film Beautiful People (1999), which was premiered at the 52nd Cannes Film Festival. Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport paid official visit to Cannes Film Festival world premier of Beautiful People (1999) where the film received a ten minute standing ovation, as well as being the only British film to win a top award at Cannes that year. Beautiful People (1999) was awarded the Best Film in the "Un Certain Regard" category, and became multi-award winning film which was distributed in almost every country in the world. Beautiful People (1999) earned Jasmin Dizdar international critical acclaim and the highest honor from Pulitzer Prize winning American film critic Roger Ebert who selected Beautiful People (1999) as number 71 in his The New York Times Guide to The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.
Following Beautiful People (1999), Jasmin wrote and directed a segment for French feature film Les Européens (2006) shot in Rome and Tunisia. The film is based on a burning social topic of refugees finding various ingenious 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 a car-roof of a middle class religious woman who starts to believe that the refugee who fell from the sky is a gift from God.
Jasmin Dizdar's next feature film Chosen (2016) staring Harvey Keitel, Ana Ularu and Luke Mably, is a moving human drama of love, loss, courage and survival against all odds. Set during the Second World War, the film tells the extraordinary story of a young lawyer who uses a clever ploy to fight the Nazis to save thousands of lives. Harvey Keitel plays the lawyer in present day New York, USA.
- IMDb mini biography by: Anonymous
- Observational realism
- Striking Eisenstein-like montage
- Transforms outsiders into unlikely heroes.
- Combines realism with a playful imagination
- Sardonic humor
- He co-wrote the song "Let's Talk About Life" for Beautiful People (1999) and was one of the performers on the song "She's Beautiful".
- He worked as an assistant director for Sarajevo Television during his film studies.
- He worked extensively on many film projects including: "Yuri Gagarin", As If I Am Not There (2010) , "Executioner", "Freedom Love", "Food Taster", "The Last Man".
- He was approached to direct films: Dirty Pretty Things (2002) , "The Restraint Of Beasts", "Carry Me Down", May 33rd (2004) .
- Although he graduated FAMU with top marks his teachers refused to give him highest university honor "Red Diploma" because of consistent anti-communist subversive messages and tackling of social taboos in his student films.
- I much prefer to find those characteristics that seem to resist culture, history and education. In other words the common denominators, which unites us rather than separates us as human beings.
- [about late British folk singer Kirsty MacColl] This is a low-budget film, and we didn't have money to pay her. But she said she'd really always wanted to sing that song "Sail Away" by Randy Newman, so she just came and set up the microphones and sung it for us.
- [on Beautiful People (1999)] I wanted to make a film about people who have so much to say and they don't know how to do it. I love to make stories and films where you actually combine things in a way that you usually wouldn't, that you see things slightly from a different perspective.
- Anyone who wants to make a film should learn their craft through the Russian silent classics, through Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. This is where you learn how to capture ambiance and lyricism. Where you learn how to construct a film at the cutting table.
- When you enter a new culture, you're a bit like a teenager, you start learning again. You're extremely sensitive, and you absorb everything.
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