Selfie 69 (stylised as #Selfie 69 or #selfie69) is a 2016 Romanian romantic comedy film directed by Cristina Jacob, a sequel to her 2014 debut Selfie. It follows Roxi, Yasmine and Ana, the three friends from the first film, now in their twenties, who after a night of partying bet on which of them will get married within three days, and the three young men whose lives the bet turns upside down. Crina Semciuc, Olimpia Melinte, Flavia Hojda, Vlad Logigan, Levent Sali and Alexandru Călin return in the lead roles. Maia Morgenstern plays the madam of a brothel in Chișinău. Dorina Chiriac, Marian Râlea, Răzvan Vasilescu and Alina Chivulescu are cast in the adult roles, and singers and television personalities such as Loredana Groza, Antonia and Codin Maticiuc appear in small parts. Zazu Film, the company Jacob founded in 2011, produced and distributed the film with support from Romania's National Film Centre (CNC). The announced budget was €1.1 million.
Released on 16 September 2016 after a summer-long campaign and a tour of previews with the cast, Selfie 69 sold 25,121 tickets on its opening weekend, the best start for a Romanian film since 1990. It became the most-watched Romanian film of the year, with 150,536 admissions according to Cinemagia, which followed it through twenty weeks in cinemas, or 133,744 in the cumulative lists the CNC published later. In October 2016 the producers announced it as the first Romanian film to gross more than two million lei. It won the Audience Award at the 2017 Gopo Awards and received one other nomination. Before its release the film was screened at the Montreal World Film Festival, and in 2019 it was added to Netflix.
Plot The story picks up the six characters from the first film a few years later. The three girls are now in their twenties. The film opens at a wedding. Just out of a painful break-up and after a hard night of partying, Roxi (Olimpia Melinte), Yasmine (Crina Semciuc) and Ana (Flavia Hojda) make a bet that quickly goes viral on Facebook. The bet is on which of them will manage to get married in the next three days. Each has a man in mind. Roxi keeps making up and falling out with Magi (Vlad Logigan), a perfume salesman who tells her he puts on magic shows in kindergartens and who, as the production notes put it, would do anything for her except mop the bathroom floor and change the cat litter. Ana is counting on Bogdan, known as Brain (Alexandru Călin), a methodical young man from a small provincial town who cares more about his studies and the rockets he builds than about what goes on around him. Mihai (Levent Sali), the hustler of the group, for whom easy money is the best money, falls for a prostitute, Iulia (Silvia Busuioc).
The three young men end up in a brothel run by a Moldovan mob madam, "the White Woman" (Maia Morgenstern), a woman with one blue eye who runs a human trafficking ring and keeps two heavies by her side. There the boys get what the film's publicity called a big helping of "Moldovan hard-core". The heavyweight mixed martial arts fighter Tolea Ciumac plays one of the Moldovans. One of the boys falls in love with a girl from the brothel and runs away with her. Meanwhile Yasmine, the rich girl of the first film, is humiliated and ends up naked in the middle of the city, and Ana, a spoilt daddy's girl, finds out that the wedding she took for granted will not come easily. Ana's father, Nea Ceaușu (Răzvan Vasilescu), tries to buy marijuana. A fortune teller (Dorina Chiriac), a blind man (Marian Râlea), a bank clerk (Maria Dinulescu) and Sergiu (Răzvan Fodor), the history teacher from the first film, all cross the friends' paths. Nudity, car chases, an art theft and a tango number follow. Whether any of the couples makes it to the altar stays open until the end.
Cast The cast, with the characters as listed by Cinemagia: Crina Semciuc as Yasmine Olimpia Melinte as Roxi Flavia Hojda as Ana Vlad Logigan as Magi Levent Sali as Mihai Alexandru Călin as Brain Răzvan Vasilescu as Nea Ceaușu, Ana's father Alina Chivulescu as Cecilia, Roxi's mother Maia Morgenstern as the madam Dorina Chiriac Marian Râlea as the blind man Răzvan Fodor as Sergiu Silvia Busuioc as Iulia Alex Bogdan as Elvis Tolea Ciumac as Gulie Maria Dinulescu as a bank clerk Raluca Aprodu as Laura Andrei Huțuleac as the boy from Yasmine's childhood Mihaela Mihuț as Lili Tudor Istodor as a weed dealer Alin State as a weed dealer Adela Popescu as the bride Loredana Groza as a bridesmaid Andrei Runcanu as the photographer Mihai Smarandache as Dragon Slayer Rudy Rosenfeld as an old man Conn Horgan as the German Emilian Oprea George Piștereanu Radu Vâlcan Codin Maticiuc Virgil Ianțu Lidia Buble Natalia Mateuț
Nine of the first film's actors return: the six leads, plus Vasilescu, Chivulescu and Fodor. The producers presented Morgenstern, Chiriac, Râlea, Alex Bogdan, Andrei Huțuleac and Tolea Ciumac as the film's "unusual characters", and a second group, made up of Groza, Antonia, Fodor, Lidia Buble, Adela Popescu, Radu Vâlcan, Virgil Ianțu, Speak and Codin Maticiuc, as special guests. Antonia said it was her first film. Groza plays a guest in the wedding scene that opens the film. The singer Peter Pop plays a stutterer.
Production Development and financing Jacob spoke of a sequel as early as the premiere of the first film, in May 2014. The first film's result, the best of any Romanian release that year, led her to announce the sequel for 2015. She said later that audiences had asked for a second part and that their reactions had given her the strongest motivation for it. She wrote the screenplay with Maria Spirache, who had also worked on the first film, and with Tudor Potra, who graduated in film directing from UNATC and in film theory from the Sorbonne Nouvelle. The 2015 announcement of the shoot also named a fourth writer, Alex Jecu, who does not appear in the final credits.
Under the title Cum să te măriți în 3 zile (How to Get Married in 3 Days), the project entered the CNC's 2014 funding competition, the first held under the institution's new board. When the results were announced at the beginning of October, it came second among fiction features, with a credit of 1,190,000 lei, behind Călin Peter Netzer's Ana, mon amour (1,590,000 lei). By January 2015 Cineuropa was already writing about the project as #Selfie 69, with a budget of about €800,000, €270,000 of it from the CNC, some 30 shooting days planned for the spring and a Romanian release set for October 2015. The press release announcing the start of filming used the working title #Selfie 2: Cum să te măriți în 3 zile and put the budget at €900,000. The film was produced by Zazu Film, which also handled the distribution. Cinemagia and Cineuropa credit Daniel Iacob as producer, Cinefan and Box Office Mojo add the director, and the 2015 announcements named Cristina Dobrițoiu, the producer of the first film. Film New Europe's country report for 2016 describes the film as produced by Adrian Sârbu, the former chief executive of Central European Media Enterprises, through Zazu Film.
Jacob said in the summer of 2016 that she had been working on the film for two years. Her mother, the director recalled, rang her when she heard the new title to ask what kind of films she was making. A first teaser was already circulating under the title #Selfie69 at the end of 2015, when the producers announced the film for 2016 as more chaotic, more dynamic and livelier than the first.
Casting and rehearsals The six young leads were kept, and Jacob added established names in the adult parts, above all Maia Morgenstern, in a role the producers described as provocative and atypical. Morgenstern said she had not understood the script at the first reading because the information, the images and the jokes came too fast, that the rehearsals had been essential, and that she built the part out of irony, dialogue and costume. Jacob again insisted on rehearsals, which she ran as workshops. Tolea Ciumac, a heavyweight fighter, was cast as one of the Moldovans. Speaking on set, Logigan said that Morgenstern, whom you might expect to behave like a statue, had played around like a child the whole time. Levent Sali said he had based Mihai on himself.
Filming Filming began on Monday, 30 March 2015, and was scheduled to last until 7 May, in 41 locations in Bucharest and Ilfov County, with Barbu Bălășoiu, the cinematographer of Sieranevada, behind the camera. Later press releases spoke of 33 shooting days in more than 43 locations in and around Bucharest, and at the trailer launch in May 2016 Jacob herself counted eight lead actors, 64 locations and 69 extras, a coincidence she pointed out to the audience. At a preview in Ploiești she said the film had 68 actors with speaking parts, not counting extras, a great many locations, stunts and dance sequences, and that it had been a bigger challenge than the first film. Sali recalled shooting a sex scene with Silvia Busuioc while wearing a skin-coloured patch, which stuck so well that he yelled when he peeled it off. The tango sequence took two months of work.
The film was edited by Gabriel Tudor Marin, Dragoș Teglaș and Dan Nanoveanu, and the costumes were designed by Adina Bucur, who had also worked on the first film. Colour grading was done at Digital Cube in Bucharest by Claudiu Doagă and was finished in August 2016. The film is in the 1.85:1 format and runs 116 minutes, though Cinefan gives 118.
Music The music was written specially for the film by HaHaHa Production, the production house of Smiley, which had also made the songs for Selfie and for Jacob's second feature, Love Is a Story. Its producers said at the trailer launch that more than 30 instrumentalists had worked over 320 hours on 46 scenes, and that the music followed the mood of each scene instead of being written for particular performers. Șerban Cazan, a producer and composer at HaHaHa, said after seeing the film that it was much better than the first one. The singer Jazzy Jo created a large part of the music together with Smiley and sings some of the songs. The piece for the tango sequence went through more than two hundred versions, Jacob said.
Release Promotion The release date was pushed back several times. The film was announced for spring 2016, then for April, for May and for the summer, and finally, on 25 July 2016, for 16 September, with the tagline "Indecent de romantic și feelingos de sexy" (roughly "indecently romantic and soulfully sexy"). The official trailer was launched on Saturday, 28 May 2016, at 7 pm at Romexpo, during East European Comic Con, in a full hall, with Jacob and several of the actors present. The invitation promised that the actors would answer questions about what the "69" in the title meant.
The campaign made the most of two run-ins with Facebook. At the end of June the platform refused to run the poster, on which Olimpia Melinte's navel merges into Crina Semciuc's lips holding a wedding ring, under the tagline "It's a fucking lovestory", citing its rules on vulgar language. Jacob said the ban was the last thing she had expected and that Facebook had no sense of humour. Two weeks later the site refused to promote the first page of "Dirty Yasmine", a diary of Semciuc's character published on insideyasmine.ro. At the end of August the producers released eleven character posters, made in a few weeks by the agency Safe Frame, each with a hidden message and with "69" as the common element. Cinemagia described them as the first promotion of this kind for a Romanian feature film. A series of Mediafax interviews with the actors ran around the release under the heading "Selfiemania cucerește România" ("Selfiemania conquers Romania").
Previews and premiere