Immigrant, Bojan Bodruzic’s first feature film, debuts in the U.S. alongside seven recent others at the Museum of Modern Art’s fifth annual Canada Front. Though he denied any autobiographical reading at all and had shortened the first-person working title, I Am an Immigrant, while admitting that the story is “informed by my life,” this young man born and raised in Sarajevo tackles adjustment in two worlds, Old and New, cutting back and forth between two Bosnian immigrants’ stories.

Bodruzic’s movie shows imagination and promise but is hampered by the errors of youth, such as needless technical experimenting, non-dramatic spelling out, ambition still beyond its reach, and a skimpy out-of-pocket budget (until outside funding “came aboard”) of $127,000 Canadian, evident in sometimes difficult sound quality, bare-bones locations and the graininess of 24p video blowup.

It is suggested that the story of newly arrived Enko Sauka (Bodruzic’s non-professional friend Jovan Milojevic, “who doesn’t want to act”) may in fact be just the forty-page ending to the script that already settled, creatively blocked Bojan (Bodruzic, billed as Bojan Markovic) needs to apply for financial backing. Possibly, but real-life director Bodruzic feels, rather, that his film is really of “double dreams, one going forward, one backward,” the established immigrant going back to homeland, family, friends and music, the other making his lone way in an unfamiliar environment.

While dealing with alienation and fitting in, the result, however, is more successful as a study in egotism, in the film Bojan’s self-absorption and inability to appreciate what Grandma (Emilija Bodruzic) sees as a good catch of a girlfriend and future wife in blonde Canadian Emily (Emily R. Laue, the director’s real-life spouse). That the relationship is already leaky is evident at once, in the lovers’ awkward stagy dialogue that reveals what the two don’t know about each other and, for some, also indicates an off-putting self-effacement in her. Whether learning takes place so he sees his error, reforms and is rewarded with reunion, is left ambiguous.

Too many black-screen titles for leapfrogging place and time over the recent half-decade, Bojan’s sister (Una Memisevic) encourages feckless Emily to purchase two airplane tickets for Bosnia. There they stay with his grandparents, she humorous with her little “sit down”-“coffee?”-“juice?” English, he (Josip Bodruzic) introduced previously in black-and-white, and both unwrapping shrapnel fragments to show the war’s inroads that come near to killing his parents and potentially all of them.

Auxiliary and yet central, the most effective scenes are grandfather’s self-conscious home movie-ish rooftop account of repairing a TV cable amidst falling shells, followed by Enko’s revelation to interested date Anik (Sasa Brown) of his willing mutilation to get an exit visa and of his wife’s chance mortar death, and our first thoughts on watching his face as unseen fireworks announce a holiday.

Low-key, however, the film lacks confidence in its visuals, and much exposition is spoken in cellphone monologues. Milojevic is good as the immigrant of measured words seeking love as integration and an antidote to loneliness, but his long memory and recounting of a dream to a nameless overnight date (Stasa Andric) is illustrative, for it becomes screen-real only when himself as a crop-haired woman (Dragana Bodruzic) returns phantom-like to the Old Country.

Not that today necessarily witnesses more displacement than yesterday, but films are taking more notice than ever of the problem, of successes and failures. With its dual, theoretically mutually reinforcing tales, Immigrant offers an interesting angle, though, again, its hero who is equally selfish and shortsighted in both worlds is what one remembers. With wider experience and mastery of his tools, and attempting to achieve less -- he also produced, worked cameras, edited and composed -- Bodruzic may find the sureness of control. As he sings in one of his own songs, other countries have “been the ruin of me, made me into a blockhead, just a refugee.”

(Released by Japanese Polka Dancing Films; not rated by MPAA.)