In July, the chef and food-media personality Eddie Huang woke up to a text message from Jason Ropell, a film executive at Mubi. It sounded urgent: “Let’s talk soonest.” Mubi, which distributes indie and foreign films and streams them to millions of monthly subscribers, had been preparing an August premiere for Huang’s documentary Vice Is Broke, which charts the rise and fall of his former employer Vice Media. Mubi had acquired rights to the film in January for a healthy six-figure fee, which included some theatrical screenings — a good deal for Huang in today’s documentary market. But, according to Huang, Ropell proceeded to tell him over the phone that those screenings were now canceled.
Mubi claims Huang all but requested to cancel the screenings himself. A day earlier, Huang had posted on Instagram about his opposition to venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital acquiring a 10 percent stake in Mubi for $100 million. The investment, announced in May, had caused an uproar in the indie-film community. Sequoia had invested in an Israeli defense company called Kela following the October 7 attack, amid Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza. In his Instagram post, Huang stated that unless Mubi properly addressed the situation, he would not promote his own film. “I’m not being dramatic or corny,” Huang wrote. “We have to start saying ‘NO.’”
In the end, Vice Is Broke premiered on Mubi’s platform in August, though without its theatrical screenings or Huang’s participation. But Mubi’s problems were only multiplying. An activist group called Filmworkers for Palestine launched an online campaign demanding that Sequoia partner Andrew Reed be removed from the company’s board.
