Selfie (2014)

Interesting facts

• Awards: 2 · Nominations: 4. Including: Gopo Award for Most Popular Film; Gopo Award for Most Popular Film

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.

Production

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.

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.

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.

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, A…

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.

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