Jim Jarmusch has added his voice to the growing backlash against Mubi after the arthouse distributor took on an investor with close ties to the Israeli military earlier this year. Mubi co-produced the director’s latest movie “Father Mother Sister Brother,” which premieres on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival.
Criticism toward Mubi has been mounting since the company announced a $100 million investment from Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital film that also invested in a defense-tech startup founded by Israeli intelligence units in response to the terror attacks of Oct. 7. Numerous artists with ties to the distributor have signed an open letter urging Mubi to not only reconsider its relationship with Sequoia but to publicly condemn the company over what it describes as “genocide profiteering.”
“My relationship with Mubi started much before that, and they were fantastic to work with on the film. I was disappointed and disconcerted by this relationship [between Mubi and Sequoia]. If you want to discuss it, you have to address Mubi. I’m not the spokesman,” he said during the film’s official press conference. “Yes, I was concerned. I also have a distribution agreement with Mubi for [some films] which I entered into before [the company’s] agreement [with Sequoia].”
On a personal level, he continued, “I’m an independent filmmaker and I’ve taken money from various sources to fund my films. All corporate money is dirty. If you start analyzing each of these film companies and their financing structures, you’re going to find a lot of dirt. You can avoid it and not make films at all. But films are how I carry what I like to say. I’m concerned, but one thing I don’t like is putting the onus of the explanation of us, the artists. It’s not us.”
Indya Moore, one of the stars in the film, also weighed in on what she describes as “incredible amount of creative warfare and resource warfare behind the scenes” of Hollywood.
“People are trying to find out how to work in a capacity that’s ethical and not enabling,” she said. “I think the kinds of due diligence that people are trying to do is a developing process.”
The ongoing war in Gaza has been a major topic of conversation at the Venice Film Festival, where one day earlier a massive protest took place to turn attention toward the humanitarian crisis.
“Father Mother Sister Brother” marks Jarmusch’s first trip to Venice with a film since 2003’s “Coffee & Cigarettes.” Told in the present day in the form of a triptych, “Father Mother Sister Brother” is an anthology about the relationships between adult children and their parents. The film, premiering in competition on Sunday night, features Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Moore and Luka Sabbat, all of whom joined Blanchett on the dais. Adam Driver, who also stars in the film, skipped the Sunday afternoon press conference.
As for each chapter, “Father” follows siblings Jeff and Emily (Driver and Bialik) who check up on their hermetic dad (Tom Waits) in rural New Jersey; “Mother” centers on sisters Lilith and Timothea (Krieps and Blanchett) as they reunite with their guarded novelist mother (Rampling) in Dublin; while “Sister Brother” follows twins Skye and Billy (Moore and Sabbat) while returning to their Paris apartment to address a family tragedy. Jarmusch, donning dark sunglasses, shared the unique reason for choosing each city that’s spotlighted in the film.
“Dublin was important because Charolette’s character is a writer, and Ireland is very welcoming. Writers don’t play taxes. They celebrate writers.” Meanwhile, “Paris is my kind of second place in my life that I love so deeply. It’s very close for me,” he shared.
He had a less romantic answer for the motive behind shooting in the Garden State.
“Jersey was a union question. I had to find the location within 30 miles of New York City for union rules, or my budget would explode,” he said. “This was 29.5 miles from New York.”
A recurring question in the press conference was where Jarmusch came up with the idea for “Father Mother Sister Brother.” Yet even the director isn’t quite sure.
“I really don’t know where the hell it came from. I usually carry ideas around for a year or more, sometimes many years, before I finally write very fast,” he said. “I wrote this in three weeks. It stayed quite close to my original vision.”
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