A grey, autumn day in October 1993. Two apparent strangers start a fight on a double-decker bus and are thrown off. One is a Serb, the other a Croat and they're fighting their own mini Bosnian war in the heart of London. This is the starting point for the epic Beautiful People, a human comedy with even more characters and plot-lines than Altman's Short Cuts.

Dizdar, who was born in Bosnia and studied film at the FAMU school in Prague, acknowledges that the sheer logistics of a film with 25 leading characters and 30 principal locations was daunting. "But I wouldn't compare the film to Short Cuts at all."

On the face of it, Beautiful People may appear like a naturalistic, character-driven drama in the Mike Leigh or Ken Loach vein. Dizdar, however, throws in various semi-surreal scenes, none more startling than the one in which a drunken, drugged-up English football fan (Danny Nussbaum), weaving his way across the airport tarmac in Amsterdam, collapses, falls asleep, and ends up being parachuted into the Bosnian war zone with a consignment of humanitarian supplies. Here, his stash of heroin proves invaluable to UN medics without proper supplies. "When I write, I just let my imagination go," says Dizdar, "but when I direct, everything has to be done in strictly realistic terms. That combination - realism chasing imagination - has always been part of my work."

Dizdar also casts a satirical outsider"s eye on British culture. In scenes vaguely reminiscent of Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hospital, we see stressed doctors, callous politicians, teachers and journalists go about their business. Although the writer-director exposes the petty snobbery and cruelty of the characters, the film ends on an oddly benevolent note.

This is something the director attributes to his background. "That's very much a Balkan element. We're a very unpredictable nation. That applies whether you're Serb, Croat, Bosnian or Macedonian... only a few years ago, we were all so much in love with each other it's just unbelievable.

"Now, everything has turned upside down and the people have become so ugly, so full of hatred, not only for each other but for themselves. That contradiction is something in our character that has always attracted me." Geoffrey Macnab