MUBI Blog

WATCH FILMS FROM THE IMAGES FESTIVAL FOR FREE! For the duration...

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 11:07:04 -0700

WATCH FILMS FROM THE IMAGES FESTIVAL FOR FREE!

For the duration of the 25th anniversary edition of the Images Festival (site), Toronto’s second oldest film festival and the largest festival in North America for experimental and independent moving image culture, we’re presenting three films from the program worldwide — and for free!

At the AV Club, John Semley writes that Antoine Bourges’s medium-length film East Hastings Pharmacy is “a gripping watch, wondrously despondent without ever seeming miserable.”

In Monique Moumblow’s short, Charles, a young man delivers a monologue in Danish outlining a chronic series of disturbing actions and strange behavioral patterns attributed to his brother, Charles; and in Puhelinkoppi (1882-2007), Hope Tucker documents the final days of the last public phone booths in Finland.

The festival runs through Saturday, April 21, so you’ll want to watch these innovative films now!

Watch Films from the Rome Independent Film Festival for Free!

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 09:11:25 -0700

We’re partnering with the Rome Independent Film Festival, running through April 20 (site), to present — for free! — a selection of films from this year’s lineup.

Alessandro D’Ambrosi and Santa De Santis’s Nostos tracks the surreal journey of a young Italian soldier who deserts in 1943. Elisa Resinaro says her short MyShoes “aims at mixing the fast paced language of thriller movies with the sweet-sour tones of a true melodramatic fiction.” In Nicolò Mazza de Piccioli’s Notizie da Godot, a young screenwriter celebrates with friends as one of his films heads to Cannes.

All three of the above films are viewable worldwide, but you’ll have to be in Europe to watch Daniele Sartori’s Doris Ortiz in which a man of the cloth pursues two surreal clowns through the night.

Watch Tobe Hooper's Debut Feature, "Eggshells"!

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:14:50 -0700

Last week, in partnership with Watchmaker Films, we presented Tobe Hooper’s rarely seen comedic short The Heisters (1964). This week: the main attraction, Hooper’s debut feature, Eggshells, (1968/69), long believed to have been lost until, four decades on, it was rediscovered, restored and presented at the 2009 edition of the South by Southwest Festival.

That’s when Louis Black, a co-founder of both the Austin Chronicle and SXSW, wrote that “Eggshells makes explicit what many have long assumed — that Hooper’s sense of cinema is the defining characteristic that makes [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)] great. Eggshells is a true 1968 film, psychedelic and political; it seems clear that Hooper had watched more than a film or two by Jean-Luc Godard. The film celebrates alternative lifestyles and politics and people and an odd, kinky semi-mysticism that is grounded more in humor than the supernatural. It captures what Austin looked like in the Sixties as well as the political sensibility shared by so many at the time. As a period piece and/or as a psychedelic film and/or as a first effort by a gifted director, the film is well worth watching. But there is something more going on. Throughout Eggshells are the kinds of telltale camera movements, manipulations of POV, casually intricate cutting, and scenes that are mystifying and haunted, elements that all come to fruition in Chainsaw, where they harmoniously work together to create that horror film masterpiece.”

Beyond a few rare festival screenings, Eggshells has seldom been seen and has never had a proper release. Until now. Watch and enjoy.

Watch Tobe Hooper's "The Heisters"

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 05:16:00 -0700

In late 2010, a panel of judges that included John Carpenter, Wes Craven, John Landis, George Romero, Guillermo del Toro and Eli Roth put The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) at the top of Total Film’s list of the “Greatest Horror Movies Ever Made.” But five years before Tobe Hooper would carve his signature on the genre, leaving a proud and permanent scar, he made a feature for $100K called Eggshells — which, for decades, was believed to have been lost. But in 2009, a print was discovered and presented at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Hooper’s hometown, and it’s since seen the occasional festival screening — but never a full-blown release. Until now.

MUBI’s proud to be teaming up with Watchmaker Films to present a proper worldwide release later this month of what Hooper himself describes as “a real movie about 1969, kind of verite but with a little push, improvisation mixed with magic. It was about the beginning and end of the subculture. Most of it takes place in a commune house. But what they don’t know is that in the basement is a crypto-embryonic hyper-electric presence that managed to influence the house and the people in it. The presence has embedded itself in the walls and grows into this big bulb, half-electronic, half organic. Almost like an eye, but like a big light, it comes out of the wall, manipulating and animating. I’ve always described it as being a mixture of Andy Warhol’s Trash and Walt Disney’s Fantasia.”

Tobe Hooper will have more to say about Eggshells when we host a Q&A — do come and bring your Qs! To whet your appetite for Eggshells, we’re presenting The Heisters, a short Hooper made five years before, in 1964. It’s a “10-minute color comedy about three medieval outlaws who get into an absurdly escalated Road Runner-cartoony fight over their stolen booty,” as LM Kit Carson describes it in a profile of Hooper for Film Comment. “It won awards at the Tours, Cannes, and San Francisco film festivals.”

Watch it now! The Heisters.

Istanbul Film Festival 2012

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:59:00 -0700

We’ve partnered with the Istanbul Film Festival, currently running through April 15, to present a couple of films to viewers in Turkey for free right here.

Rémi Bezançon’s A Happy Event is “the film Knocked Up strived to be,” writes Serena Whitney at exclaim! “Bezançon’s visual style and his uncanny ability to embrace inappropriate humor, as well as being able to showcase couples at their most vulnerable, make this film stand out from the rest.”

In Keep Me Upright (Tiens moi droite), Zoé Chantre, diagnosed as a child with scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, chronicles her “search to find words to fit her symptoms and visual expression for her condition,” as the Berlin International Film Festival described the film when it screened in the German capital in February. “Proceeding chronologically from her diagnosis, Chantre playfully splices together pencil sketches of bodies and body parts, medical diagrams and images and film footage to create a rich seam of visual, linguistic and sonic associations.”

Watch Films by Larry Jordan

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 05:48:21 -0700

Larry Jordan, occasionally known in more formal circles as Lawrence Jordan, has been making experimental and animation films for half a century now. A friend of Stan Brakhage, with whom he hung out in New York with the likes of Maya Deren, and of Bruce Conner, with whom he started Camera Obscura, a film society that ran for a number of years, Jordan also established The Movie, San Francisco’s first 16mm experimental film theater in 1958. He’d also become a founding director of Canyon Cinema Cooperative, with whom we’re partnering to present seventeen of Jordan’s films.

So where in the world to start? Probably with Our Lady of the Sphere (1969), if for no other reason than that it was entered into the National Film Registry in 2010. Here’s what the Library of Congress has to say about it: “Jordan uses ‘found’ graphics to produce his influential animated collages, noting that his goal is to create ‘unknown worlds and landscapes of the mind.’ Inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Our Lady of the Sphere is one of Jordan’s best-known works. It is a surrealistic dream-like journey blending baroque images with Victorian-era image cut-outs, iconic space age symbols, various musical themes and noise effects, including animal sounds and buzzers.”

Another recommendation would be Cornell, 1965 (1978). The background on that one is that, in 1959, Jordan sent Joseph Cornell a handmade book of stills taken from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and the two of them struck up a correspondence. McKenna: “Over the next few years, Cornell commissioned Jordan to provide photographs and film sequences for him by mail…. In 1965, Cornell asked Jordan to come east to be his assistant. Living for a month in Cornell’s house in Flushing, Jordan worked on box assemblages, edited Cornell’s film Legend of Fountains and shot new footage for him, in addition to making the only film of Cornell at work.” Jordan would continue to make boxes and collages of his own throughout the following decades.

In 1970, Jordan won a Guggenheim award to make Sacred Art of Tibet (1972), which features lives scenes and his friend Dean Stockwell. The San Francisco Chronicle has called it a “monumental effort that is laced with brilliant artistry, moments of deep impact.”

If you’re looking to sample more recent work, Jonathan Marlow has a suggestion: “Cosmic Alchemy [2010] is thematically and visually consistent with his earlier shots and yet, set to an evocative score by John Davis, Jordan has crossed into an unfamiliar and richly rewarding territory of metaphoric complexity. For the handful of folks unfamiliar with Lawrence Jordan’s work, Cosmic Alchemy will leave you desperately wanting more. For the rest, already quite familiar with his brilliance, this film will install a fresh appreciation for Jordan’s justifiable position among experimental cinema’s ascended masters.”

This way to the cinema, Films by Larry Jordan.

Watch Award-Winning Films by Reha Erdem

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 07:44:20 -0800

We’ve just opened a virtual cinema featuring the work of Reha Erdem, ranging from the blackly comic to the eerily poetic (and we should note right at the top that not every film mentioned here will be viewable in every country; we do what we can). In the US, most were first introduced to Erdem when his Times and Winds, which had won the award for Best Film (as well as the FIPRESCI Prize) at the Istanbul International Film Festival in 2006, saw a limited theatrical run two years later before its release on DVD. It’s “a film bewitched by the rhythms of everyday life in a remote Turkish village,” wrote Ed Gonzalez in the Voice. “Erdem sees pain and love the same way he does the moon and sun — as constant, illuminating forces — and his camera pushes forward as if on an axis, peering at family and communal experience through the impressionable eyes of three pre-adolescents.”

“Aching with the Górecki-like symphonic throbs of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, the film suggests a version of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive for the new millennium, even if its poetry outpaces Erice’s,” wrote Michael Atkinson in 2008. “You’re never sure what’s going on in these enigmatic images, or, really, between them (the characters do not express themselves openly), you’re just sure you’ve never quite seen this particular brand of mysterious poetry before.” In 2007, Michael Guillén, at the top of one of his excellent roundups, recalled being moved to tears: “I noticed a fellow a few seats away from me who kept staring at me with a bemused grin…” Of course, it turned out to be Erdem himself.

Erdem began picking up awards with his feature debut, Oh, Moon! (1989) when it screened at festivals in Locarno, Nantes, Moscow, Vancouver and Dunkerque. It’s the tale of Yekta, an 11-year-old girl who lives in a mysterious, castle-like house on the shore of the Bosphorus and daydreams about her long-lost mother.

Erdem’s second feature, Run for Money (1999), a black comedy about the insidious power of money, was Turkey’s entry that year in the race for the Foreign Language Oscar. Mommy, I’m Scared (2004), also known as What Is a Human Anyway…, is another comedy set in contemporary Istanbul and indeed won the FIPRESCI prize in the National Competition at the 23rd International Istanbul Film Festival.

In 2009, Italian journalist Giorgio Gosetti explained FIPRESCI’s decision to present the same award to Erdem once again: “What made My Only Sunshine (Hayat Var [2008]) stand out was the precision with which it conveys the values of a larger movement of filmmakers belonging to the strange condition of a country making a thrilling passage from Asian tradition to European sensibility…. The story deals with the troubles endured by the fourteen-year-old Hayat, who lives with her father and grandfather in today’s dangerous Bosporus. Her father owns a little fishing boat, using it for illegal traffic. Young Hayat’s life is tough and merciless, but she resists falling into despair — even when she is raped, even when life shows her how indifferent and cruel it can be. This courage and hope, held against all odds, will lead Hayat to a sort of martyrdom — the dramatic and natural issue in this contemporary society, full of sound and fury — which she confronts without losing her faith in love, or people, or the future.”

Watch films from DocsBarcelona for free!

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:40:47 -0800

How would six Catalan artists depict Japan, and would these visions match reality? Those questions are explored in Japan: Imaginary Visions, just one of a good handful of short documentaries from DocsBarcelona you can watch right now — for free! — thanks to our partnership with the international film festival and pitching forum, an annual meeting of audiences and professionals in Spain’s bustling city.

Note that not every film is viewable in every country, but for most, four or five works should be available through Sunday.

Watch Films by Kate McCabe

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:40:01 -0800

We just opened a cinema featuring four short films by Kate McCabe, founder of the art collective Kidnap Yourself. Often combining live action photography and animation, with time manipulation techniques both in-camera and with optical printing, much of her work, distributed by Canyon Cinema, explores a realm between daydreams and reality.

She describes Tack (1995; image above) as “a collage of outtakes, forgotten still camera negatives, and super 8 film all chopped and rearranged on 35mm leader.” Portraits (2001) is comprised of 37 ten-second animated light paintings of artists and friends. The Chicago Underground Film Festival has called Das Neue Monster (2001) a “Frankenstein for identity politics.” And of her 17-minute film from 2004, she says: “Moving to Los Angeles seemed to me like traveling to a remote planet and we were astronauts hovering within its borders isolated in a strange sanctuary. Milk and Honey allows you to drift into that twilight world and dream of home.”

My French Film Festival 2012. Watch Now!

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:48:00 -0800

Through February 1, we’re partnering with the My French Film Festival to show you ten recently released French features (first and second films) and ten French shorts. Presented by Unifrance, the festival invites you to award points to the films you like at the main site — and these points count, as six prizes will be awarded (three for features, three for shorts): the Internet Users Prize, Social Networks Prize and International Press Prize.

Outside of both competitions, we’ve also got a few extra presentations. The online festival was a hit around the world last year and you won’t want to miss this second edition. Check out our notes on all the features and shorts here, then watch, enjoy and tell your fellow Francophiles!

More MUBI for Less Money

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:59:50 -0800

MUBI has just reduced its prices across the board, including much lower monthly subscriptions. We’ll even give you unlimited viewing for 14 days for free to indulge in the very best of cinema. Start your free trial here.

There’s never been a better time to watch a great film online.

Love,
MUBI Team

Watch Films by Thomas Imbach

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:32:39 -0800

Thomas Imbach’s Day Is Done, which screened in the Forum at this year’s Berlinale in February and won the Zurich Film Award 2011 earlier this month, opens in Berlin on Thursday. The site’s flaunting some pretty winning quotes, with Screen Daily noting that the documentary essay features “images of ravishing though unconventional urban beauty,” while Der Tagesspiegel writes that an “evocative maelstrom of great power emerges in the course of nearly two hours.”

But you won’t have to be in Berlin to watch work by this independent Swiss filmmaker. For a full year, we’ll be showing a selection of Films by Thomas Imbach.

Well Done (1994) is an absurdist comedy about the all but uncontrollable flow of data and money through Switzerland. Augusteb “loved it.” In Ghetto (1997), we follow a group of teens through an anarchic class room, a basement disco and into the night. “Allow the film 15 minutes to start sinking into you,” advises Giammiz, “and then you are going to love it.”

Happiness Is a Warm Gun (2001) offers “variations on a true story,” as the tagline goes, namely, that of Petra Kelly, a cofounder of the German Green Party who, in 1992, was shot dead while she slept by her partner, ex-general and Green politician Gert Bastian. Happiness screened in Berlin, Locarno and also won a Zurich Film Award.

Lenz (2006, image above) tells the story of a filmmaker researching Georg Büchner’s novel fragment Lenz. In August, Tsienni wrote: “Thanks to an empathetic show of sensitivity and personableness, this film manages to weave those little seemingly banal moments from one man’s quaint inner quest into a beautiful visual hymn of veritable life.”

If you read German, by the way, Michael Sennhauser writes about Imbach’s work in a recent issue of film-dienst. But of course, you won’t need to know German to watch Films of Thomas Imbach here on MUBI.

Festival Cine//B (site), dedicated to exhibiting the latest...

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 06:23:05 -0800

Festival Cine//B (site), dedicated to exhibiting the latest work from young filmmakers, opened in Santiago on Friday and runs through November 13. We’ve teamed up with the festival to present over a dozen shorts and one feature, Victor Ruano’s El cadáver exquisito (site), which “combines documentary, fiction and experimental filmmaking as it traverses the social and oneiric landscape of a region struggling between modernity and tradition.”

Take a look at the full program and start watching — for free!

Watch Films from the Mar del Plata International Film Festival for Free

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 06:17:17 -0800

The 26th Mar del Plata International Film Festival (site), the only festival in Latin America with ‘A’ status, opened yesterday and runs through November 13. We’re partnering with the festival to present a selection of films from South America, ranging from Demián Rugna and Fabián Forte’s feature Cursed Bastards, “leading the charge for the next volley of extreme Argentine cinema” (Todd Brown at Twitch, where he’s got the trailer; that’s an image from the film above, by the way) to a slew of shorts including Matías Canony’s Alias, Alexander Katzowicz and David Katzowicz’s Versus and Tetsuo Lumière’s irresistibly titled Take My Hand! Sticky Bloody Love. Check out the program and enjoy — it’s free!

Lomography, the magazine, shop and community dedicated to...

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:42:00 -0700

Lomography, the magazine, shop and community dedicated to analogue photography, has put together a selection of films on MUBI and invites you take inspiration from them to start making movies and photos of your own.

To that end, they’ve introduced Lomokino, a 35mm movie camera: shoot a movie of 144 frames on any 35mm film. What’s more, they’re teaming up with us to stage a fun competition, “Your Movie Scene.” The idea is simple: Recreate a favorite movie scene, snap an analogue photo, tag it and send it in. All the info you need is right here. Prizes? Of course: there are three in all, each packaged with a one-year subscription to MUBI. Again, all details are here. Just 16 days left!

AFI FEST 25th Anniversary Retrospective

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:13:07 -0700

With the AFI FEST opening today and running through November 10, we’re celebrating this 25th edition with a retrospective of some of the very best films that have screened at this beacon of cinephilia in Los Angeles over the past quarter of a century. Not every film we’ve selected — titles by the likes of Jia Zhangke, Aleksandr Sokurov, Arnaud Despleshin, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Azazel Jacobs and many more — will be available absolutely everywhere in the world, but take a look at the films you can start watching right now.

Now Playing in Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico: MAPFRE's 4+1 Film Festival

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 09:12:42 -0700

Until November 4, MUBI and MAPFRE’s 4+1 Film Festival bring some of the highlights from the world’s film festivals to Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Spain and Mexico, where you can watch them online, instantly!

Held simultaneously in 5 cities, MAPFRE 4+1 is known as the “festival of festivals” bringing together some of the best festival gems on the circuit.

Among the 14 titles in the Official Selection are Takashi Kitano’s Outrage, which screened in Competition in Cannes, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, from the 2010 Venice Competition lineup, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light, a stunning documentary featured in Cannes and Toronto, Otar Ioselliani’s Chantrapas, which screened at Cannes and won a Jury Prize at Mar de Plata; Morgen (Marian Crisan), winner of a Special Jury Prize at Locarno; Tilva Ros (Nikola Lezaic), winner of the FIPRESCI critics award in Transylvania; Nénette (Nicolás Philibert), featured in Berlin and in San Francisco; and Color Perro que Huye (Andrés Duque), which screened at Rotterdam and Punto de Vista.

Plus, films by Agnès Varda, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and more. Enjoy these and other award-winners from around the world, but don’t forget they’ll ony be available until Friday the 4th!

Watch Films from the Paris Korean Film Festival for Free

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:12:19 -0700

Since 2006, the Paris Korean Film Festival (Festival Franco-Coréen du Film, opening today and running through October 18) has screened a wide variety of Korean films in the Latin Quarter of the City of Light. This year, the Festival and MUBI are presenting a generous sampling of 17 films you can now watch for free.

Joe Seung-yeon’s Rough Education (image above) tells a story of young friendship in the 80s. Little white lies lead to some pretty serious fibbing in Nam Yeon-kyung’s Lies. A new teacher struggles to connect with school kids whose previous teacher has commit suicide in Koh Su-kyung’s Bad Education.

In 0.201, Ko Seok-heui reveals the ways history resonates in today’s Seoul. Sin I-soo shows us a Seoul few are likely to have known in Dear Lara.

Choi Sung-eun’s Dead Drunken Master is a martial arts comedy about an office worker trying to teach himself to drink alcohol. A beauty shop employee tries to explain away a revealing photo of herself in Hyun Jeong-jae’s Make-Up.

An astronaut aims for a new planet — and a new life — in Lee Han-bit’s Cosmic Man. Another space traveller is an animated dog in Kim Da-hye’s Space Radio.

Cho Sung-bin and Haam Kisoo’s animated short Dart pits a former dart champion against a spider.

A motley collection of characters inhabit a dilapidated building in Shin Hyun-tak’s Dogs and Flowers. An upstairs-downstairs conflict turns violent in Zhang Dong-kook’s The Death of a Good Neighbor.

Lee Hyung-suk tips a broad-brimmed hat to an American genre in Western Movie.

A couple’s celebration of their 1000th day together does not go as planned in Lee Se-hyung’s 999. In Oh Hyun-min’s Adios, a split couple reunite — very tentatively.

Yoon Sung-jun tells One Man’s Story in a photo album.

Kim Young-soo’s Pest depicts the aftermath of a virus outbreak in the near future.

Watch Films from the Abu Dhabi Film Festival for Free

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:10:00 -0700

The Abu Dhabi Film Festival (formerly the Middle East International Film Fest), opening today and running through October 22, is committed to presenting works by Arab filmmakers in competition alongside the major talents of world cinema. The Festival and MUBI are presenting a feature film you can now watch for free.

“A historical fiction, [Hisham Lasri’s] The End opens in July 1999, on the eve of the death of Morocco’s longtime monarch Hassan II (1961-99), whose demise marked both the end of an era as well as the filmmaker’s childhood,” writes Sally Shafto in Senses of Cinema. “The film tells the story of a marginalized youth, M’key, in search of a father figure, who falls in love with Rita, a young woman whose virginity is ensured by her gang-member brothers by keeping her enchained. M’key is the protégé of Daoud, the police commissioner whose nickname is ‘the system’s pit-bull’ and who was responsible for torturing and killing, years before, Rita’s father. Daoud appears to be a stand-in for Hassan II, seen here as a kind of super cop. During his reign, known as the period of lead, Hassan II imprisoned many political dissidents. The End definitely merited its Special Award, because Lasri has attempted something ambitious with his first film. [Critic] Mohamed Dahan calls The End an example of ‘the new Moroccan cinema, light-years away from the “cinema du Papa” and the reasonable tone of Morocco’s first filmmakers.’”

Watch Films from the Mill Valley Film Festival for Free!

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:36:52 -0700

MUBI is partnering with the Mill Valley Film Festival, opening today and running through October 16, to present a selection of films you can watch for free.

You might begin with a taste of the finest from the Golden State, Deborah Koons Garcia’s Portrait of a Winemaker: John Williams of Frog’s Leap, which is also a tribute to one man’s economically viable answer to the growing problem of water scarcity.

The subject of another portrait by the filmmaker is Rob Hopkins. Her interview with founder of the Transition Movement, a response to climate change and shrinking supplies of cheap energy, takes place in the original Transition Town, Totnes, England. Hence, the title: Transition Town Totnes.

Robert Redford narrates Will Parrinello, John Antonelli and Tom Dusenbery’s The New Environmentalists (image above), a collection of portraits of activists from around the world who have won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. “What connects the six crusaders featured in the documentary,” wrote Julian Guthrie in the San Francisco Chronicle last year, “is a refusal to listen to the word ‘no’ and an unrelenting drive that pitted them against formidable — and at times dangerous — adversaries.”

Josh Biggs and Natalie Boulton’s Voices from the Shadows (viewable only in the US and Canada) approaches chronic fatigue syndrome from the points of view of patients, caretakers and medical experts.