Coming to VOD tomorrow, Tuesday, February 10: LOVE ME
Jonathan Narducci’s look at Ukraine’s Internet bride industry debuted at the Florida Film Festival last year. Screenings followed at New Orleans, Hot Docs, Hot Springs, CNEX Doc, Newport Beach, and San Francisco DocFest, among others. Gravitas Ventures now releases the film across all major VOD and digital platforms.
Narducci’s film follows several American men, and one Aussie, as they seek love through modern technology via the matchmaking website A Foreign Affair, which connects suitors with Ukrainian women. While the service doesn’t promise brides – it instead facilitates online interactions, and, for a further fee, arranges trips to Ukraine for in-person social gatherings – many of the six men profiled in the film don’t seem to really understand the distinction. Their unrealistic expectations, and, frankly, their often very skewed view of the innocuous virtual correspondences they’ve begun with the site’s Slavic beauties, lend Narducci’s film its most watchable – though often cringeworthy -moments. While some of the men simply seem to be living in a fantasy world, this is sometimes exacerbated by less-then-genuine women eager to string along lovesick suckers, but, unsurprisingly, it’s more difficult to fully capture the former on camera. For other participants, they approach A Foreign Affair more cautiously, and often with more successful results. While generally engaging, the film’s biggest drawback is its glut of subjects – beyond the six would-be grooms (one or two too many, frankly), there are family members, dating site representatives, some of the women, and more heard from – and this survey structure makes the project feel overlong. While the awkwardness and Schadenfreude of the disastrous matches make this viewer friendly, mail order bride scams have been the focus of other documentaries before, so there’s not much new here, while the happier endings don’t really have much inherent drama.
what (not) to doc 