Meet The Man Behind MUBI, Efe Cakarel

Hi all,
So, following on from my post from the Cannes Film Festival where SCEE and MUBI announced its partnership to bring a film lover’s paradise direct to your PlayStation 3, I sat down with MUBI founder and CEO Efe Cakarel to talk about the service and the idea of bringing a whole new world of independent, classic and foreign cinema to you, the PlayStation Community.
Enjoy!

So, announcing at Cannes must be a really exciting experience?
There really is no better place. Cannes is the most important time of the year for us. This is where every major distributor comes to meet, and this is the natural place to announce a service that we think is so important for the industry.
And having the support of someone like Agnes Varda behind MUBI must be special too?
You know, Agnes is very passionate about what she does, and we really wanted her to be here because that’s what MUBI is about – it’s about showcasing the wonderful work of these filmmakers, both established auteurs like Agnes and emerging talent.
Can you tell us a bit about how the partnership between MUBI and SCEE came about?
We saw from very early on that the browser is a very limited experience to watch art house films, so we needed to get to the TV. The TVs are now Network connected but that’s a couple of years away in terms of penetration into the mainstream, and there are set top boxes that you can programme on but then there’s all this talk and nobody has them because who wants to pay large amount of money on a set top box.
Then you take a step back and say what else is connected to the Internet and TV? Gaming devices, and the leader is PlayStation with some 35 million PlayStation systems out there. With SCEE we really felt we were very close to the PlayStation sensibility in terms of how they are positioning the PS3 not just as a gaming console but an entertainment and media device. So we approached them and it just made so much sense that this offering belongs to PlayStation.
You must be quite intrigued by the idea of opening up the world of independent cinema to the PlayStation community, then?
I’m fascinated! I really believe we are going to create an entire new audience of people who are going to be introduced to these films and they’ll love them. I’m very optimistic about the prospect of these films finding a good home on PlayStation. Gamers are creative, they like entertainment, they love the PS3, they spend time on it and they want to consume this kind of media.
Is it safe to say that MUBI’s uniqueness lies in its ability to connect film fans around the world and allow them to share in their passion for cult, classic and indie films?
Exactly. You’ll come to MUBI, you’ll be able to follow your PSN friends and you’ll be able to share films and director’s information right there on film pages and director’s pages with one click. For example, you land on a film, watch it and really love and then you can tell four of your friends about it with just one click. And if your friends don’t have MUBI, they’ll be able to download through that link.