David Farnor | On 06, Apr 2016

MUBI has snapped up the exclusive streaming rights for a plethora of recent festival hits, including Berlinale Panorama opener I, Olga and Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room.

The subscription site, which curates a range of world and classic cinema, adds a new title every day to its streaming library, with each title available for a 30-day window. That unique model has seen the SVOD company grow rapidly despite the dominance of subscription rivals such as Netflix. MUBI now operates in 200 territories and in the last year has announced plans to launch in China during 2016 and signed deals with Sony, Paramount and Miramax. On Friday 22nd April, the site will team up with New Wave Films to distribute Miguel Gomes’ in UK cinemas, before releasing it online in May.

Now, the site is stepping up its catalogue of exclusive content with a wave of new acquisitions. MUBI has secured World digital rights on two titles and UK theatrical and digital rights on four more – three of which debuted at last month’s Berlin Film Festival.

I, Olga, from first-time film directors Tomas Weinreb and Petr Kazda, is an intense re-telling of the Czech murderess Olga Hepnarova, set in 1970s Prague. MUBI has secured theatrical and digital rights for the film in the UK & Ireland and will premiere the feature in cinemas and on the service before summer 2016.

MUBI has secured rights for US, UK and Ireland for Rachel Lang’s feature length debut, Baden Baden, and also the UK and Ireland rights Eugène Green’s latest feature, Son of Joseph. They will both premiere in cinemas and on the service later this year.

MUBI also announced global digital rights on Luis Lopez-Carrasco’s experimental, 80s-set El Futuro and Ion de Sosa’s Suenan Los Androides, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2015 and is loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. El Futuro premiered at Locarno in 2013 and went on to screen internationally at Rotterdam and New York. Both films will receive their global online premieres on MUBI, on 11th and 12th April respectively, and will be available to view for one month, per MUBI’s release model.

Rounding out their haul of new titles is the César-nominated The Blue Room, directed by Mathieu Amalric. The erotic thriller stars Amalric alongside Léa Drucker and Stéphanie Cléau and debuted at Cannes in 2014, in Un Certain Regard. The Blue Room will be released as a UK/IRE premiere later this year.

Bobby Allen, MUBI’s VP of Content, comments: “We are extremely excited about bringing these incredible films to our audience, fresh from the festival panorama. These exclusive digital and theatrical rights acquisitions are part of our wider strategy to bring the best of global cinema to our subscribers.”

These high-profile acquisitions arrive hot on the heels with a new deal at last month’s EFM to screen an array of WIDE’s library films in US, UK and Mexican markets, including Locarno Special Jury Prize Winner A Perfect Couple, Rotterdam Tiger Award Winner Clip and Locarno Golden Leopard nominee Nuage.

MUBI have also signed global rights on 10 titles from the Rivette and Duras Library, including Out 1, which will arrive later this month, and global non-exclusive rights with Arte International for the William Klein library, with a MUBI retrospective planned later in 2016.

Global non-exclusive rights for 17 major film festival titles have also recently been signed with BAC International, including Michel Franco’s After Lucia and Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, and with Sine Olivia Pilipinas for nine titles to form a Lav Diaz retrospective, including Storm Children and Melancholia.

MUBI will also be “very active” at Cannes as it looks to sign more exclusive deals.

A subscription to MUBI costs £4.99 a month. For more information, visit www.mubi.com – and for a weekly guide to what’s coming soon on MUBI, click here.

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