Film distributor MUBI either had a very good or a very lousy year, depending on how you want to slice it. From a strictly financial point of view, Efe Cakarel’s indie movie studio and streamer has never done better for itself, securing new deals with directors like Jim Jarmusch and Lynne Ramsay, increasing its presence at the international box office, and scoring a big dose of new funding back in May courtesy of venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. That latter point, though, was also the source of a firestorm of controversy from fans and subscribers over Sequoia’s other investments—notably an Israeli defense contractor called Kela—which led more than 10,000 MUBI subscribers to end their support, and toss out their distinctive blue-and-silver tote bags, in 2025.
Now, Vulture has posted a new report exploring life at MUBI in the aftermath of the controversy, while also attempting to chart why this kind of backlash hit the company much harder than some of its competitors. (Noting, for instance, that A24 recently took plenty of money from Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, itself with a number of ties to Israel’s military, without catching anything resembling the ire.) A lot of that reasoning focuses on MUBI’s self-cultivated position as less of a film company than a lifestyle brand: Cakarel started the company with a deliberate push to appeal to educated cinephiles, and MUBI got much of its early heat from operating message boards and comment sections that allowed movie fans to trade commentary and critiques. Not wholly surprisingly, a lot of the same people drawn to the left-wing, progressive indie films and documentaries that the service’s streaming arm began to highlight also turn out to be pretty pro-Palestine, and so the Sequoia move very specifically alienated MUBI from a fanbase it had cultivated specifically for their outspoken passions.
The Vulture piece notes that Cakarel—whose “models of creative control” are noted as being “Mark Zuckerberg at Meta and Elon Musk at Tesla”—initially dismissed the pushback, in internal communications to his employees, as “trolling.” It was only once the problem became more visibly widespread that the company began instituting efforts to ameliorate the impact. (Notably, pushback came from subscribers, possible partners—with announcement of the Sequoia money killing a deal to release Oscar-winner No Other Land earlier this year—and MUBI’s own employees, 200 of whom signed an anonymous letter protesting the funding.) Cakarel (who reportedly didn’t know about Sequoia’s investment in Kela, but who also reportedly didn’t vet the company very hard before taking their money) ultimately responded by offering a written statement acknowledging “the immense suffering, displacement, and starvation of the Palestinian people” as “a humanitarian catastrophe that must end,” as well as announcing new policies on “ethical funding,” and plans to launch an “Artists At Risk” fund to help support filmmakers “working under conflict, displacement, or censorship, including Palestinian filmmakers.”
As for the future, the Variety piece notes that MUBI has been making obvious moves lately to transition out of its “indie darling” role and into something more obviously corporate—in which case, exchanging fans for a big infusion of cash might actually wind up playing into the company’s plans. In any case, the whole thing now serves as a handy, if complex, lesson on the way the facile world of corporate politics can intersect with actual passionate beliefs held by the real people propping these companies up, and the damage that can happen when the two come into conflict.
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