The Los Angeles Festival of Movies (LAFM), heading into its third year April 9 – 12 in 2026, has parted ways with MUBI as a presenting sponsor, as LAFM shared on Instagram Thursday.
The festival launched in 2024 with MUBI as a sponsor to bring the best of independent film to Los Angeles over one weekend. MUBI has been subjected to internal and external strife since receiving a $100 million investment from the venture capital company Sequoia, which has also supported companies tied to Israeli military technology amid the war on Gaza.
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MUBI CEO Efe Cakarel said in August that the distributor and streamer’s profits have no relationship to other companies in Sequoia’s portfolio. MUBI secured the investment at the end of May 2025, around the time it acquired the Jennifer Lawrence-starring film “Die My Love” out of Cannes for a reported $24 million. MUBI declined to comment on the LAFM news, and referred back to Cakarel’s statement from August.
Filmmakers and MUBI staff have since implored the company to drop its relationship with Sequoia, with a request to remove Sequoia partner Andrew Reed from MUBI’s board.
MUBI’s fall slate includes, along with “Die My Love,” Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” and Jim Jarmusch’s Venice Golden Lion winner “Father Mother Sister Brother.” At the Venice Film Festival this year, Jarmusch expressed discontent over MUBI’s relationship with Sequoia and said he’d had conversations with its leaders about next steps.
Back in August, IndieWire obtained a letter signed by roughly half of MUBI’s staff sharing frustrations over the investment. Cakarel said that Sequoia is a minor investor in the company with no oversight on programming or distribution. Expected on October 15 is an internal policy at MUBI, to be shared publicly, on guidelines to ethical investments.
Micah Gottlieb and Sarah Winshall co-founded the L.A. Festival of Movies as a response to the 2018 discontinuation of the L.A. Film Festival. Gottlieb’s film non-profit Mezzanine also serves as a sponsor.
Here’s the festival’s full statement, as shared on Instagram, below.
In the spirit of continuing to build trust and transparency with our community, we want to share that LAFM has parted ways with our presenting sponsor MUBI, on account of its financial ties to Sequoia Capital, a company invested in Israeli military technology and the ongoing campaign of genocide in Gaza.
This was not a decision taken lightly. LAFM is still a brand-new festival run by a fledgling nonprofit organization, and we are still largely dependent on corporate sponsorships and donations. This decision definitively puts us behind on our fundraising goals for next year.
With MUBI, we were able to work with a marketing team that understood our mission of bold curation, and supported us in cultivating dynamic spaces for cutting-edge arthouse and independent cinema. We are now actively seeking sponsors and donors who share those values.
When we began in 2024, we arrived in an incredibly precarious environment for independent cinema. We planted a seed in a city dominated by the commercial film industry, in order to build a foundation for the kind of film culture we want to perpetuate.
Like many, we have been witnessing the genocide in real time on our social media feeds. And like many, we question our material ability to move the needle as a cultural arts organization. But we do not want to remain indifferent.
We are so lucky to proceed with intention, curiosity and warmth. It is these values that we want to imbue to our partners and to our audience.
The support that we get from you goes a long way.
Please consider supporting us, and help us make it to 2026.
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