"She brought me up to see that it's the humanity that matters," says Dizdar, the 38-year-old director of Beautiful People. His film takes the message to heart, following a cross-section of Londoners who are bruised -- but never beaten -- by the horrors of a Bosnian war far closer than they realize. How apt that a big sunflower figures prominently in the ad campaign for the film, which won Dizdar a prize at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

Only 10 years before, the director was another immigrant with a British girlfriend trying to find his way in London. He had a degree from Czechoslovakia's most prestigious film school, and many short features under his belt. He had written a book about another expatriate, the Czech director Milos Forman. What he didn't have was anything more than fractured English. "When I came there I couldn't ask for a packet of crisps in the shop," he says now, the heavy tones of Central Europe blurring into plummy Britspeak.

After looking at his short films, the BBC commissioned him to write a radio play, then several television dramas. The British Film Institute jumped to develop his treatment for Beautiful People, making the Bosnian outsider the very model of a model British filmmaker in just a decade.

He drew on years as a beneficiary of the nation's notoriously good manners, a habit he treats with humor and affection in the film. "If you're a Bosnian and you come to dinner, your appearance is explosive. There's this enormous pressure to behave diplomatically: 'Are you all right there? Are you sure you don't want anything else?' They'll hold your hand: 'I'm really sorry about what happened to your country, it's really terrible.'

"My mission was to open them up, to say, 'You don't have to do that. We can talk at different levels. We can be friends.' In Britain, that takes time."

Promoting the film gives the director a chance to look at another nation with fresh eyes. In between interviews, he breaks out his video camera and shoots the intricate arrangement of glassware and napkins in a hotel conference room. "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."

Coming from what he calls a "cultural earthquake zone," Dizdar remains surprisingly optimistic that England and other nations will adjust to new racial and ethnic realities, not to mention the influx of refugees from the former Yugoslavia. After all, his life and his film are both accident-filled tales with hopeful endings.

And he has the fingers to prove it. As a kid, he sliced off most of a finger playing in his grandmother's garden. Frantic, his mother wanted to call an ambulance. His grandmother said there was no need. She placed a pinch of tobacco in the wound and pressed the flesh together. "My mom said, 'This way it'll be crooked.' My grandmother said, 'So what?' " He holds out the finger. It is still crooked -- as crooked as the path that took him from the Balkans to Boston, to talk about a film made in Britain, the country he now calls home.