Amazon Prime Video has acquired the rights to the movie “#SelfieParty” – a comedy produced by Vitamin Film Studio for Ukrainian entertainment TV channel Sonсe.
Amazon users will now be able to rent the +16 movie for $2.99 or buy it for $9.99. A month earlier, on Dec. 14, Amazon made its Prime Video service available in 200 countries and territories, including Ukraine.
“Four friends, who are all students, wake up in a police station, not remembering the events of yesterday,” reads the synopsis of the movie. “They are accused of murdering a dwarf, whose body was found on the lawn of the house where the boys partied the previous night. To figure out what happened, the boys decide to collect all the photos and videos from yesterday’s mayhem.”
While an Amazon user commenting on the film dubbed it “a great college comedy,” the movie has not been universally well received.
It has a 5.8 rating out of 10 in the internet movie database owned by Amazon, IMDb, and 5.7 on KinoPoisk, a Russian website on cinematography.
“‘#SelfieParty’ is a huge step back for Ukrainian cinematography. It’s (about) vulgar jokes, and bad acting,” KinoPoisk user Christina Kutnikova wrote in her review. “The director just copied a typical American party. I’d have liked to see something familiar, to see that it’s set in my country. But apart from a Ukrainian flag hanging up at the petrol station shop, I didn’t recognize anything.”
But Vlad Finyak, another film reviewer from Ukraine, said that technically the movie was well made, and fit for any movie festival.
“(The clear) picture, sophisticated camerawork and music video type of montage makes me forget that just 15-20 years ago people in our country shot low-grade rubbish,” Finyak writes.
Released in March 2016, the movie grossed $180,000 over seven weeks of screenings, according to Box Office Mojo, a website owned by Amazon that tracks box office revenues worldwide. The budget, according to film director Lyubomyr Levitsky, was $80,000.
The Sonce TV chanel (Solar Media) positions itself as “a TV channel of positive emotions, with no news, politics, social topics or bad moods.” It was launched in 2013.
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].
