American film-goers had to wait 16 years to see the fourth installment of George Lucas' series, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
Ukrainian video pirates needed less than a week to get the bootleg version out onto Kyiv streets.
Illegal copies of the blockbuster were first sighted May 24 in city street underpasses and suburban video outlets. The movie's worldwide release was May 19.
Prices ranged from Hr 8 to 10 ($2 to $3) for the neatly shrink-wrapped 130-minute PAL-format tape.
Watching the film legally in an American or European movie theater costs between $6 and $10.
A copy obtained by the Post has mostly scratchy sound, sometimes degrading to outright silence. A male voice-over speaks on top of, and often in competition with, the actors' English. The video quality is uniformly poor.
The Ukrainian version of Phantom Menace appeared to be a copy of a video shot in a movie theater projection room somewhere in the United States. Voices and cheers of young American men are audible throughout the soundtrack. At one point the silhouette of a man in the audience is clearly visible.
Pirated copies of a similar bootleg have also appeared in Macao, Hong Kong and Jakarta, the Associated Press reported.
The Far Eastern version of the Phantom Menace bootleg is available in stores and in laser disc format.
The illegal Ukrainian version currently is available only on video. It is dubbed in Russian, a language understood by most Ukrainians.
The male voice, which translates all actors' speech, is one commonly heard on Moscow-distributed bootlegs of current Western releases.
How Phantom Menace came to the Ukrainian market with a probably Moscow-produced voiceover remains unclear.
But evidence indicates that Slavic video buccaneers responsible for one of the quickest violations of international copyright law probably sailed through one of Europe's most repressive dictatorships, Belarus, on their way to Ukraine's 50 million-member consumer market.
Package information on a Phantom Menace tape obtained by the Post PIRATES, identifies Minsk-based Reel Ltd. as 'exclusive distributor of the video program.' Calls to the company over a two-day period, during work and evening hours, were not answered.
The Belarussian Embassy in Kyiv had not responded to a request for information on Reel Ltd. as the Post went to press.
Though the Communist regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko still overtly toes close to a Stalinist party line, free enterprise has found many ways to make money in the swamps and forests that comprise much of the Belarus-Ukraine border.
Smuggling is the primary method. With the planned Belarussian economy distributing goods at arbitrarily low prices, enterprising traders stand to make big money if they can get Lukashenko-subsidized gasoline and diesel fuels to Ukraine's free market.
Customs on both sides of the border, of course, should stop that.
Poorly paid and by virtually all accounts chronically corrupt, both Ukrainian and Belarussian customs officers often are willing to look the other way when they identify a fishy shipment moving south.
But often times, they don't even get a chance to look. Ukrainian and Belarussian citizens require no visa to cross the border and generally are waved through checkpoints when transiting the frontier in their cars.
Some crossing points, including a Chernobyl-area, radioactive swath dozens of kilometers long, are simply not controled at all.
'We have a regular distribution network, and we got this film just like we get all the others,' said Vitaly, a video trader operating near the entrance of a central Kyiv metro stop. 'On consignment, like always.'
He declined to give his last name, citing possible retaliation by law enforcers.
The Ukrainian government has made repeated commitments, as part of its efforts to reform its economy and join the European Community, to crack down on local video piracy and copyright abuse. Usually coming shortly before Ukraine is due to receive a reform-conditioned loan from the International Monetary Fund or World Bank, Kyiv police teams have periodically cleared traders from the streets for the last three years.
The last big sweep took place shortly before a European Bank for Reconstruction and Development conference way back in May 1998.
Within days, the traders were back. At black-market video trading points recently visited by a Post reporter, few policemen were in evidence. Those seen appeared to ignore the dozens, if not hundreds, of unregistered traders clustered near the city's metro stops.
'This is my job; this is how I feed my family,' said Vitaly. 'What else am I supposed to do?'
