January on MUBI UK sees the streaming debut of critical smash Aftersun, Fassbinder and Chabrol retrospectives, a selection of debut movies and more.
Aftersun
Following a hugely successful theatrical release in November, Charlotte Wells’ critically acclaimed and award-winning Aftersun (2022) will be available to stream exclusively on MUBI from January 6th.
The stunning feature debut received its World Premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the French Touch Jury Prize. It was recently nominated for 16 BIFAs, making it the second most nominated film ever for a single title, and took home seven awards including Best British Independent Film, Best Director, The Douglas Hickox Award for Best Debut Director and Best Screenplay. Wells also won Breakthrough Director for the film at the 2022 Gotham Awards.
At a fading vacation resort in the late 1990s, 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) treasures rare time together with her loving and idealistic father, Calum (Paul Mescal). As a world of adolescence creeps into view, beyond her eye Calum struggles under the weight of life outside of fatherhood. 20 years later, Sophie's tender recollections of their last holiday become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t.
Also arriving on MUBI this January is Wells' first short film, Tuesday (2015): Every Tuesday, 16-year-old Allie stays with her dad and insists that this week will be no exception. Throughout the course of the day, she endures awkward encounters with family and friends before finally arriving at her dad’s flat where her routine is broken by the silence of an empty home.
Manifesto
With the upcoming release of Tár (Todd Field, 2022) in January, Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto (2016) will be available to stream on MUBI from January 13th.
In this captivating art installation turned feature film, Cate Blanchett portrays 13 distinct characters, including a homeless man, an anchorwoman, a factory worker and a corporate CEO. All of them in vignettes that incorporate timeless manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth century, ranging from Communism to Dogme 95 and Pop Art. Rosefeldt’s integration of art and life is seamless, while Blanchett’s immersion into each character is transfixing. Manifesto (2016) makes for a compelling watch and is definitely not one to miss.
Love, Lust and Anarchy: The Films of Fassbinder
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the eternal enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, was a formidable creative force who left behind a colossal body of work before his untimely death at the age of 37. From theatre and television to cinema, Fassbinder conquered them all. Imbued with a romantic yet anarchic spirit, his films relish the pleasures and pains of love as well as unrequited longing, all while attesting to the sociopolitical disorder creeping through post-war West Germany.
MUBI's Fassbinder focus kicks off this January with Love is Colder than Death (1969) and Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) and moves from the deliberately theatrical staging of his early films to works from the mid-1970s, when the director began to inject the stylistic elements of classic melodrama into his provocative character studies.
Claude Chabrol
This month, MUBI presents a special series focusing on the work of filmmaker Claude Chabrol. Often referred to as the ‘French Hitchcock’, he was one of the most prolific directors of the New Wave and went on to make a film almost every year from 1958 until his death in 2010.
Arriving on the platform first is Madame Bovary (1991): bored with the tedious nature of provincial life in 19th-century France, the fierce Emma Bovary finds herself in calamitous debt and pursues scandalous sexual liaisons with absolute abandon.
Chabrol’s stylish thriller The Flower of Evil (2003), which depicts the French bourgeoisie, follows, and all begins to unravel for what seems to be the perfect family when Anne decides to run for mayor.
Festival Focus: Rotterdam
Timed to coincide with the 2023 edition of the festival, Festival Focus: Rotterdam returns with three gems from last year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam: Roberto Doveris’ indie comedy Phantom Project (2022), described as “the Chilean version of Friends for the YouTube generation,” A Human Position (2022) from Anders Emblem, a portrait of a young Norwegian woman doubling as a societal commentary on life in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (2022), a luminous, naturalistic 16mm sci-fi short queering the notion of family from artist, filmmaker and writer Pedro Neves Marques.
First Films First
MUB's annual series First Films First kicks off the year highlighting a fresh selection of debut films from cinema’s finest auteurs. This year MUBI revisits the films that launched the careers of distinguished directors including: Paul W.S Anderson’s shocking debut, Shopping (1994), Lars von Trier’s neo-noir crime thriller The Element of Crime (1984), Jeff Nichols’ poetic and powerful Shotgun Stories (2007) and more.
The Last Stage
The pioneering Polish filmmaker Wanda Jakubowska brought Auschwitz to the screen in The Last Stage (1948), just years after experiencing the war’s horrors herself. Having drawn from her own experiences, the film builds a collective portrait of an international group of women trying to survive the nightmare of the camp focusing on their heroism, resiliency and solidarity. Lauded as one of the earliest efforts to describe the horrors of the Holocaust, the historic film was restored in 4k by Poland’s National Film Archive.
Actual People
Kit Zauhar’s poignant, bare-boned independent drama Actual People (2021) – a voyage into the mind of a young woman trying to find her place in the world – arrives on MUBI this month. Zauhar stars in her own debut feature as Riley, an aimless girl in her final week of college who goes to great lengths to win the affections of a boy from her hometown, as she ends up having to confront her escalating anxieties about her love life, family, and future.
