Spring 2025
Films on tap
Founded in 2007 by Efe Cakarel, Mubi favours editorial design over marketing conventions to reach twenty million subscribers in 190 countries. By John L. Walters [EXTRACT]
The first film Efe Cakarel licensed for Mubi was La Antena. Made by Argentine director Esteban Sapir in 2007, this hallucinatory, almost silent film evokes early cinema, with enormous surtitles that sometimes fill the screen, archly staged and shot in dusty, distressed monochrome. It features the meek, voiceless inhabitants of a snowbound city and a Berlusconi-like villain overlord (‘Mr TV’) whose spiral branding affects every aspect of their lives. Eighteen years on, Cakarel vividly recalls his trip to Buenos Aires to collect a hard drive copy of the film that would hit the start button on his streaming service.
The founder’s love of cinema stems from his happy childhood growing up in İzmir, a small city on the west coast of Türkiye. His mother would take him to a local theatre that showed ‘beautiful independent films’, foreign-language films – he recalls falling in love with Cinema Paradiso, which celebrates a celluloid culture that had already died. Cakarel looks back on his early cinematic experiences with similar feelings.
‘Sadly, those cinemas no longer exist in my city. There is no-one focused on showing the kinds of films I want to watch. The younger generation is increasingly not exposed to great cinema and there are less and less venues to experience it. This happened over a couple of decades … we came to a world where nobody really stands for anything and everybody’s trying to increase engagement and views, but nobody’s focused on great cinema and curation.’ For Cakarel, a former Goldman Sachs banker whose background is in computer science and business management, this was not cause for regret but a call to action. He realised that the consumer experience was shifting towards TCP / IP protocol – watching videos online …
John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London
Read the full version in Eye no. 107 vol. 27, 2025
Right and top. Global streaming service, production company and film distributor Mubi, here experienced on smartphones, tablets and laptops and domestic screens. Mubi declares: ‘We believe cinema should be viewed on screens of all shapes and sizes.’ Mubi creative director: Pablo Martín.
One of several digital assets for the Mubi Podcast, 2023. Design: Spin.
Spreads from Notebook no. 5. Creative director: Pablo Martín. The bloody images shown in the spread opposite from issue 5 are by Ed Park, the magazine’s official still life photographer, to accompany an article about fake blood.
Cover and box for Read Frame Type Film, 2025, designed by SpMillot, and the first book from Mubi Editions. By Enrico Camporesi, Catherine de Smet and Philippe Millot, with a foreword by Robin Kinross.
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.