Online movie library set for the 'killer app'

Founder Efe Cakarel says Mubi is a 'social recommendation engine for film.' Photo / Supplied

Assemble 20 film buffs in one place and ask each one of them what their idea of a great film is. You may get 20 different answers, and from there you might assemble a must-see list of your own, based on what appeals to you.

Now take that question and turn it over to the millions of PlayStation 3 owners around the world, and what you'd get should resemble Mubi.

As well as sounding like what someone suffering from a head cold might say if they were trying to say "movie", Mubi is an online service that gives its users access to a growing number of art house, independent and critically-acclaimed movies, based on the idea that people should be able to watch their choice of film, no matter how obscure, at any time they like. Furthermore, it opens the doors on a community hitherto available only on the web.

Originally launched as The Auteurs in February 2008, Mubi quickly came to be a go-to destination for cinema lovers online, where they could watch classic films on demand and offer their own critiques.

"We watch films [in] two ways," founder Efe Cakarel explained to nzherald.co.nz at the service's launch for PlayStation 3 in Sydney last week.

"Either they are heavily marketed, or someone you trust says 'you've got to see this film, it's amazing.'

"The first thing I do, is I go to Mubi. I want to talk about this film with someone, and then I'm really curious - who are the fans of this film? Those 20, 30 people - whatever the number is - I start to check their profiles and see what they else they like. That discovery is priceless for me."

"Your favourite films tell me a lot about you, and you are very curious about my favourite films because you want to know if we have a chance of becoming friends."

The idea came to the former investment banker after he found himself in a café in Tokyo with a simple problem: he wanted to view the film In the Mood for Love but had no way to watch it.

"I would have paid anything for that", Cakarel said in 2009. "Nobody was offering it to me."

Cakarel said his story, which sounded as fanciful and serendipitous as any Hollywood plotline, was completely true - from a simple idea in a distant and lonely coffee house, to having the backing of a tech giant in Sony and an artistic legend in Martin Scorsese barely two years later.

Mubi launched in 18 countries on November 4, including New Zealand and Australia. PS3 owners on the PlayStation Network can download the free Mubi app and then explore the library, currently at over 300 films and features, and set to grow in the coming months with an all-you-can-eat 30-day subscription of $24.90 - or for a matter of lunch money for short films and feature-length titles.

Cakarel announced in Sydney that Revolucion, a look at Mexico in the 100 years since its revolution, and a hit at the Berlin and Cannes film festivals, would be available on Mubi on November 20 alongside its theatrical release worldwide.

Free at launch were new restorations of two classics, Ki-young Kim's The Housemaid and Metin Erksan's Dry Summer, delivered by Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation.

Cakarel said that Sony understood their audience, and they had worked hard to position the PS3 as a complete entertainment centre rather than a dedicated gaming unit.

"Watching La Dolce Vita on a laptop is a very limited experience, and TV is the killer app. Then you realise [that] gaming devices, there are 150 million of them connected to the internet and to TVs."

"They are entertainment enthusiasts and they [Sony] felt Mubi really complements their existing content offering with the Hollywood blockbusters."

"It's cross-platform," Cakarel said of Mubi's interactivity and social network capabilities. "Beautiful."

"All your actions on the PC will be reflected on the PlayStation Network. [and vice versa] With one click, you can actually be connected with Facebook. Your activities on Mubi, on the PlayStation, are going to be reflected on the news feed."

Cakarel promised that the library would be more than a collection of "wanky" films.

"We are not just focused on obscure, art house films. We are focused on really good cinema."

"Star Wars, the first one, will go into the library. A film like Inception, a Christopher Nolan film - yes, it's huge, but it was amazing cinematography [and an] amazing story. Coen brothers films are studio films, but they belong to our service," he said.

"As we get bigger and more popular, are we going to go into Sex and the City 2 as well? No, because it's not a good film. That's why we want to create this brand and associate it with good cinema."

Australian director Abe Forsythe, who collected top honours this year at Tropfest, the world's largest short film festival, said the Mubi library offered "a pretty diverse selection."

"Mad Dog Morgan is on there, which is the film Dennis Hopper made when he came out to Australia in the 70s, where he was off his face the whole time. It's hilarious, but you probably wouldn't compare it to some of the European stuff," he said.

"It's a pretty fun list of films to go through and discover."

According to Cakarel, clicking on a Mubi-fed update on Facebook would redirect people to the relevant film's landing page at mubi.com. So here's an idea. Let's say someone sees Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope on Mubi and wants to know more about the film that's said to have inspired it. Could a user one day hope to look at the Star Wars landing page and click through to the 1958 Japanese period flick, The Hidden Fortress?

"I want to take action on that," Cakarel said.

"That's how we make it easy. Not a store or a shop, but a social recommendation engine for film."

* Movies for Mubi buffs - NZ's 20 most popular films to October 2010

1. Crimson Gold
2. A Christmas Tale
3. Election II
4. Pan's Labyrinth
5. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
6. L'avventura
7. Time Bandits
8. La Dolce Vita
9. All About My Mother
10. Ashes and Diamonds
11. Suspiria
12. Children of Paradise
13. King of New York
14. Nostalghia
15. Bowling for Columbine
16. Cinema Paradiso
17. Tess
18. Ballad of Narayama
19. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
20. Padre Padrone