Selfie (stylised as #Selfie) is a 2014 Romanian teen comedy film, the first feature directed by Cristina Jacob, who is credited on it as Cristina Iacob. It follows three girls from Bucharest who run off to the Black Sea coast two days before their baccalaureate exam instead of studying, and the three young men they meet there. Crina Semciuc, Olimpia Melinte and Flavia Hojda play the leads. The cast also includes Vlad Logigan, Levent Sali, Alexandru Călin, Răzvan Vasilescu, Alina Chivulescu, Răzvan Fodor and Florin Călinescu, with television and pop personalities such as Mihaela Rădulescu, Dan Chișu, Smiley and Alex Velea in small parts. The film was produced by MediaPro Pictures and Zazu Film with support from Romania's National Film Centre (CNC) and cost about €900,000.
Released on 9 May 2014, Selfie was the most-watched Romanian film of the year at home: 87,288 tickets according to the CNC's official count for 2014, or 102,026 according to Cinemagia, which tracked it over the 25 weeks it stayed in cinemas. Romanian critics were mostly cold towards it, faulting the thin characters and the television comedy formula, but the film won the Audience Award at the 2015 Gopo Awards, where it was also nominated in four categories, and top prizes at two festivals abroad, the Broad Humor Film Festival in Los Angeles and the Southampton International Film Festival in England. Its success led to a sequel, Selfie 69, released in 2016.
Plot Yasmine, Roxi and Ana are classmates and best friends at a Bucharest high school. On the night of their graduation party, two days before the baccalaureate, the three drive off to the seaside in Yasmine's convertible, determined to live the weekend as if it were their last. Yasmine (Crina Semciuc) is a rich girl whose parents have given her everything money can buy and not much attention. She is secretly involved with Sergiu (Răzvan Fodor), her history teacher, who refused to be seen with her at the party; the trip is also her way of going after him. Roxi (Olimpia Melinte), self-conscious about her body and hooked on selfies, was brought up without rules by her mother Cecilia (Alina Chivulescu), a former hippie. Ana (Flavia Hojda), naive and a gifted guitar player, lost her mother early and grew up under the strict eye of her father, Nea Ceaușu (Răzvan Vasilescu), who still pines for the communist years.
Between the clubs of Mamaia and the beach at Vama Veche the girls run into Mihai (Levent Sali), George (Vlad Logigan) and Bogdan (Alexandru Călin), three friends who plan to pay for a summer of fun on the coast with stolen money. The two groups mix, couples form, and one scrape follows another until a car ends up in the sea. Back home, each parent reacts in a different way. Yasmine's mother and father (Mihaela Rădulescu and Dan Chișu) leave for Monaco and block her bank card. Cecilia trusts her daughter. Nea Ceaușu imagines the worst and sets off after the girls with Cecilia in his old bus, which is full of communist-era souvenirs and breaks down on the way. A police chief (Florin Călinescu) and two watermelon sellers by the roadside (Smiley and Alex Velea) get drawn into the story as well, the latter two turning up to rescue the young people at the moment when all seems lost. In the end Sergiu decides to stand by his relationship with Yasmine. An epilogue set a few months later shows one of the girls among the demonstrators protesting against the Roșia Montană mining project.
Cast The cast, with the characters as listed by Cinemagia: Crina Semciuc as Yasmine Olimpia Melinte as Roxana "Roxi" Popa Flavia Hojda as Ana Vlad Logigan as George Levent Sali as Mihai Alexandru Călin as Bogdan Răzvan Vasilescu as Nea Ceaușu, Ana's father Alina Chivulescu as Cecilia Popa, Roxi's mother Răzvan Fodor as Sergiu, the history teacher Mihaela Rădulescu as Yasmine's mother Dan Chișu as Yasmine's father Florin Călinescu as the police chief Nicoleta Luciu as Sergiu's girlfriend Carmen Tănase Smiley as a watermelon seller Alex Velea as a watermelon seller Anghel Damian as Rareș Constantin Florescu as the maths teacher Cătălin Cățoiu as Sergiu's friend George Vintilă as a petrol station employee Bogdan Cotleț as a policeman Ion Grosu as a policeman Titi Radoaie as a driver James Simenc as the voice of George (Magi)
Smiley and Alex Velea, who shot their scenes in a single day, play a gay couple selling watermelons on the roadside, parts Smiley described as small and there for colour. Andreea Esca is among the cameo appearances.
Production Script and title Jacob wrote the screenplay with Maria Spirache, Alexandru Molico and Georgiana Alexandra "Geo" Caraman. She said she started first of all from her own experiences, being close in age to the characters, and that the scenes were then adapted together with the actors. The script went through 27 drafts. The title changed several times along the way. The project was first called Crazy Teens, then Liceenii 2000 ("High Schoolers 2000"), the title under which it was financed and shot, then Generația Y ("Generation Y"). Only in December 2013, when Jacob came across the word "selfie", did she decide that it described the film best, as a self-portrait of a generation. Jacob recalled that Smiley told her people would take it for a girl's name, since nobody knew what it meant. The word turned into a phenomenon in 2014 and the film's promotion was built around it, with characters photographing themselves on their phones throughout the story and posting the pictures on social media.
Financing Under the title Liceenii 2000, MediaPro Pictures entered the project in the debut section of the CNC's 2012 funding competition. When the results were announced in April 2013 it received a credit of 800,000 lei, more than the top-scoring debut project in the same section, Adina Pintilie's Touch Me Not, which got 700,000 lei, even though its score had been almost half that of Pintilie's. AaRC, the film database of the Romanian Filmmakers' Union, puts the sum at roughly €180,000; Jacob later spoke, in an interview for Forbes, of €300,000 in CNC funding and said the project had come first in the debut section. She explained that the competition mattered not only for the money but as a guarantee towards the other financiers, without which nobody would risk investing in a film.
The total budget was about €900,000, a large sum for a Romanian film, covered by the CNC, by MediaPro Entertainment and by other financiers, according to producer Cristina Dobrițoiu. The film is a MediaPro Pictures production, a company of the MediaPro Entertainment România group, made in co-production with Zazu Film, the company Jacob had founded in 2011, which also handled the theatrical distribution. The CNC's catalogue of Romanian films lists it as a MediaPro Pictures and Zazu Film production made with CNC support, shot in HD. Speaking to Forbes, Jacob summed up her thinking behind the project: films are made to be seen, and she wants to make commercial films that one can live off; Selfie, in her words, is a light film, "almost like a shawarma, it's a summer film", and such films are needed.
Casting and rehearsals Most of the actors were chosen through castings held across the country; Jacob said she had Vlad Logigan in mind from the time she was writing the script. Some of the non-professional performers were found on Facebook. The cast was put together on two levels: the young actors in the lead roles, Crina Semciuc, Olimpia Melinte, Flavia Hojda, Vlad Logigan, Levent Sali and Alexandru Călin, and established names in the adult parts, Răzvan Vasilescu, Alina Chivulescu, Răzvan Fodor, Carmen Tănase and Florin Călinescu, plus television and music stars in short appearances. Jacob insisted on rehearsals. The actors rehearsed for six weeks before the shoot, something she considers a must, all the more for a first-time director.
Flavia Hojda, a former finalist of X Factor and a first-year student at the UNATC film and theatre university when the film was shot, was in her first film role and said the more experienced actresses helped her a lot. Olimpia Melinte, who had just come off another project for which she had already gained weight, had to put on kilos again to play a teenager unhappy with her body; the press at the time spoke of ten kilograms. Logigan himself proposed the clown routine in George's part and learned magic tricks for the film. Mihaela Rădulescu and Dan Chișu, a well-known real-life couple almost two decades earlier, were cast as Yasmine's parents, an idea that amused Chișu. Răzvan Fodor admitted that the role of a teacher who is involved with a pupil had troubled him at first, particularly as the father of a little girl.
Filming The film was shot in August and September 2013, over 27 shooting days in 12 locations, with a crew of 68 plus nine stunt performers. The story is set in Bucharest and on the coast, at Mamaia and Vama Veche. The most spectacular sequence, a car plunging into the sea, was shot on the evening of Friday 23 August 2013 near Tuzla. Stuntman Răzvan Puiu drove the car at around 60 km/h up an artificial pier built in the sea as a launch ramp and dropped into the water. The car had been prepared for almost a month for a scene lasting a few seconds, which Puiu described as the hardest job of his career because of the height of the drop, the shallow water and the shock on landing. The scene was filmed with ten cameras and was done in a single take. Shooting wrapped at the beginning of September 2013.
The budget allowed for night and underwater filming and for more elaborate post-production than on the MediaPro comedies of the preceding years. Olimpia Melinte recalled that her hardest scene was going into the sea at night after a storm had filled the water with seaweed, with the crew standing in the water as well. The sound mix was done in Paris, at a studio where Jacob ran into Roman Polanski, who told her he had rehearsed for eight weeks on Carnage. Viorel Sergovici was the cinematographer, Ovidiu Văcaru the editor and Adina Bucur the costume designer, and the film was shot in CinemaScope (2.35:1). It runs 123 minutes; the CNC catalogue of Romanian films gives 126 minutes.
Music The score is credited to Mihai Coporan, but the songs came from Smiley and his team at HaHaHa Production, a collaboration Jacob repeated on her next film. The single "Nemuritori" ("Immortals"), the fourth from Smiley's album Acasă, came out on 24 April 2014, two weeks before the premiere, as part of the soundtrack. Its video, shot at the Capitol summer theatre in Bucharest, brings all the characters of the film together at a party. Smiley described the song as being about the age at which we all think we are immortal.
Release Theatrical run The film was announced in April 2014 as the first comedy with and about young people to reach the big screen in years, in a campaign that compared it with Liceenii, the audience phenomenon of the late 1980s. The press screening was held on Tuesday 6 May 2014 at CinemaPRO in Bucharest, followed by a question-and-answer session with the director and the cast. The next day, Wednesday 7 May, a public preview took place at the Cinema City multiplex in the AFI Palace Cotroceni mall, attended by Smiley, Alex Velea and the main actors; tickets sold out. The gala premiere followed on Thursday evening, 8 May, at CinemaPRO, with Andreea Esca, Smiley and producers Andrei Boncea, Ruxandra Ion and Alma Bacula on the red carpet.