I LOVE ME

Belarusian underground filmmaker Nikita Lavretski asked twenty filmmaker friends to each make a no-budget short inspired by a weekly column of weird news stories from Minsk, Belarus, for his "cinema zine" called "COOL (News from Belarus)".

I chose a news item called “A late-night wanderer hijacked a taxi with two passengers,” and cast my friends, to interpret a Minsk story in Hollywood.

“I Love Me” is a Belarus tale about a weird car theft.

Budget: pizza.

CRAIG STARK as Tank
BRIAN BELL as Hank
MICHELLE STRATTON as Mickie
ARI GOLD as Shlomo
WALLY as Himself

Music by ETHAN GOLD from the "Adventures of Power" soundtrack.

Edited by Jack Sweeney.

Produced by Grack Films plus Haley Adams.

“COOL (News from Belarus)” - subscribe to see the whole project. Premiere at FILMADRID, 2023.

Original tale from ANTON SERENKEV's column:
A late-night wanderer hijacked a taxi with two passengers! News is coming from patriarchal Brest that would have made even our Zibitskaya proud. Recently, two tired drinkers summoned a taxi to the doors of a bar, loaded into the salon, and didn't protest when the driver, without turning off the engine, asked permission to step away for a minute -- it was five in the morning, there was nowhere to hurry. They probably didn't even have time to check social media when a completely stranger suddenly sat in the driver's seat and immediately drove off to take care of his own business. Fortunately for the passengers, the thief's business was somewhere within 100 meters of the bar. He stopped the car and again without explanation, ran out of it. The police soon caught him, he didn't lock the door, and he immediately confessed to everything. The 35-year-old man, who had never been in court before, when asked why on earth he would do such a crazy thing, replied that he had just come out of the bar and suddenly felt the strongest desire to take a ride in the car, even if only for a hundred meters. All that's missing is for a police officer to ask the man in front of a camera if it was worth it, and the man, like Eric Cartman, would reply, 'Oh, it was worth it!'.