Unlike Netflix, on this platform you will find more "cultured" and curated content

In its most recent advertising campaign, which featured several posters on the New York subway, the message of the streaming platform was evident. The target audience is not the same as Netflix, which watches over a massive, wasteful consumption, with a catalog of films and series without filters for any type of person. Instead, in a tone that can be confused as arrogant – or even snobby – Mubi recognizes that its target is in moviegoers labeled, vaguely, as cults.

Leer en español: Mubi: La plataforma para cinéfilos esnob

Some of the posters referred to filmmakers that, perhaps, the everyday and normative public does not recognize. Surnames such as Tarkovsky, Martel, Winding Refn, and even Lynch, posed on their posters.

The most notorious example was the one that alluded to Tarkovsky. The poster noted that "If you think that Tarkovsky composed 'The Swan Lake', do not try Mubi." What could seem harmless, even comical, was not taken with plausibility, leading the CEO to ask for public excuses through Twitter.

However, this upward and elitist attitude over the other platforms is evident in the way in which it works. The curatorship is strict. It offers only thirty movies a day with a limited duration of thirty days.

Each day they add a new film and remove the one that has its expired cycle. In the same way, they have made retrospectives of several renowned directors such as Luis Buñuel, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, among others.

The cinema has died – and it has already revived

Director Nicolas Winding Refn, who is one of Mubi's allies, recently declared that the cinema has died, but that it has been revived. Although the provocateur is ambiguous in his statements, he has watched over the platform to expand and reach new spaces.

The platform is free for university students around the world. A bet that not only makes it clear that Mubi recognizes young people, as the group that moves trends and masses through social media.

Although there are detractors for the paternalistic character that the platform can apparently have, young people can be encouraged to consume this type of content, indicating a growth and strengthening of the critical cinematographic eye.

Also read: Why the Latin American market is the new frontier for streaming services

The platform allows a conversation and feedback around the seventh art. Users can access custom lists made by other users on specific topics. Feminist films, movies about youth and sex, LGBTI-themed movies, among others, are some of the lists that users can access and learn about the films of interest.

Mubi Notebook is another section of the page, where collaborators can delve IGNORE INTO issues that revolve around the cinema. Likewise, there are interviews with cinematographic figures, allowing the user to have a didactic, quasi-academic experience with the platform.

The future of streaming

Mubi does not seek to compete with massive platforms such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, which have dabbled with prolixity in the original production of audiovisual works. Although Mubi was able to produce an original short film directed by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, its message remains plausible to ensure quality and not quantity.

Mubi has appropriated the rights of some independent works of different festivals in the world to function as a distributor. It has allowed the platform to have a global vision of cinema, and not, an Americanized vision, since it has films recognized in relevant festivals around the world.

Even recently, the Colombian film 'Adiós Entusiasmo' was available on the platform, at the same time that it was on the national stage, providing an alternative window to this film to be experienced all over the world.

Is it worth?

These types of platforms do matter. Like Mubi, there are other alternative platforms such as Filmstruck, or the streaming option of the British Film Institute (BFI Player). Apart from offering streaming services, these digital platforms offer on demand movies, cultivating the specific tastes of people with large-scale films over the need to expand on small-time content.

These give economically accessible options to audiences who are tired of Netflix, a monster that has lost strength because of its eclectic content.

LatinAmerican Post | Juan Pablo Heilbron
Translated from “Mubi: La plataforma para cinéfilos esnob”