Mubi and the Chanel Culture Fund are extending their ongoing partnership with a new curatorial initiative focused on Asian experimental cinema, teaming up with Hong Kong’s M+ art museum on a ten-film streaming collection titled Between Tides: Asian Avant-Garde.
The slate will launch globally on Mubi on Jan. 16, bringing together works by filmmakers including Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kidlat Tahimik, Liu Jiayin, Vinothraj P.S. and Trương Minh Quý.
The partnership marks the first time M+’s moving-image initiatives will be made available to a worldwide streaming audience, a step that both deepens Chanel’s cultural-patronage footprint in Asia and expands Mubi’s curatorial ambitions across the region, the partners say.
The collection draws from M+’s broader Asian Avant-Garde Film Circulation Library, an ongoing research and restoration project supported by Chanel that also includes M+ Restored, a program dedicated to preserving Hong Kong’s film heritage, and M+ Rediscoveries, a recurring series spotlighting restored classics and experimental cinema from across Asia.
Yana Peel, president of arts, culture and heritage at Chanel, said the new initiative reflects the house’s long-term commitment to filmmakers across the region. “Chanel Culture Fund supports generations of filmmakers across Asia — from preserving Hong Kong’s cinematic heritage with M+, to championing creative freedom and technical innovation at the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. It is a tremendous honor to highlight the region’s vital importance in cinema across Mubi’s 190 markets, bringing Asia’s immense filmmaking talent to the international stage and celebrating the moving image across its analogue origins and its digital future.”
The Between Tides lineup spans nearly six decades of Asian filmmaking, from Sek Kei and John Woo’s Dead Knot (1968) and Han Ok-hee’s Untitled 77-A (1977) to recent festival-circuit standouts such as Bo Wang’s An Asian Ghost Story (2023), Daphne Xu’s Notes of a Crocodile (2024) and Trương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam (2024).
Landmark works such as Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare, Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour are also included, with territory-specific rights exclusions applying to select titles, according to Mubi.
The project is designed to further underscore Mubi’s positioning as both a global streaming platform and a curator of arthouse and auteur cinema, following a recent slate that includes titles from filmmakers such as Park Chan-wook, Luca Guadagnino, Sofia Coppola and Joachim Trier, as well as a growing production and co-production business through MUBI Productions and Match Factor.
Teaser art for Mubi, Chanel and M+’s upcoming “Between Tides: Asian Avant-Garde” streaming program.
