Beautiful People

Beautiful People - 1999 | 109mins | Drama, Comedy | Colour

The Production Team

Director: Jasmin Disdar.
Producer: Ben Woolford.
Executive Producer: Roger Shannon.
Script: Jasmin Disdar.
Cinematography: Barry Ackroyd.
Special Effects: Hart Special Effects.
Editing: Justin Kirsh.
Art Direction: Cristina Casali.
Production Design: Jon Henson.
Costume Design: Louise Page.
Make-up Department: Penny Smith.
Sound Department: Simmy Claire.
Original Music: Garry Bell.

The Cast

Rosalind Ayres - Nora Thornton
Linda Bassett - Nurse
Charlotte Coleman - Portia Thornton
Edin Dzandzanovic - Pero
Nicholas Farrell - Dr. Mouldy
Julian Firth - Edward Thompson

Plot Synopsis

Beautiful People is the comic story of a group of people living in London during the preliminaries of the World Cup who have been affected by the Balkan conflict. Structured in a similar way to Robert Altman's Short Cuts, writer-director Jasmin Dizdar, himself a Bosnia refugee, manages to extract plenty of humour from a depressing situation.

London 1993. When Bosnian refugee Pero (Edin Dzandzanovic) is hit by a car, he ends up in crowded hospital with a fighting Serb and a Croat (Frank Purti and Dado Jehan), also teenage Welsh arsonist (Nicholas McGaughey). Portia Thornton (Charlotte Coleman) is the kindly trainee doctor who does her best to bring warmth and humanity to proceedings and falls in love with the penniless Pero. In the same hospital, there is overworked obstetrics doctor Mouldy (Nicholas Farrell) who oversees a Muslim woman who was raped in Bosnia and now wants an abortion.