Producer-financier Closer Media hits Cannes for global auteur search | News

Targeting an annual output of three to five films, founder and Chinese real estate billionaire Zhang Xin and president Jonathan King aim to go into production later this year on projects from Tom McCarthy, with whom King made Spotlight while at Participant, and Joseph Cedar, the Israeli filmmaker behind Beaufort and Footnote.

“We want to make more films,” said Zhang. “We want to work with the best talents of this generation and globally.”

The pipeline includes Alice Winocour’s Paris Fashion Week drama Couture starring Angelina Jolie, which is in post, and Orwell producer Alex Gibney’s in-production Elon Musk documentary, about the billionaire’s tech career and his controversial post-US election role slashing jobs at the helm of Department of Government Efficiency.

In the four years since Zhang founded the company during the pandemic to champion bold voices, Closer Media has backed a string of notable festival premieres and invested in Mubi.

“We’re very global,” said Zhang of the roster of filmmakers. Pawo Choyning’s Oscar-shortlisted Bhutanese film The Monk And The Gun was the first title to emerge and played in 2023 TIFF alongside two others – Tony Goldwyn’s drama Ezra and Gibney’s documentary In Restless Dreams: The Music Of Paul Simon. Justin Lin’s Last Days and Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s documentary Middletown debuted in Sundance in January.

Closer Media acquired an undisclosed stake in Mubi earlier this year. Zhang had been looking to invest in a distributor and also took a seat on the board. “I love that company’s high growth,” she said. ”I loved that it’s for cinephiles, and I love that it’s both theatrical and streaming.”

Mubi has North American rights to The History Of Sound (and Focus Features handles international) and its willingness to do 45-day exclusive theatrical releases was appealing to Zhang. Closer Media does not automatically put its films through the streaming platform and works with distributors and sales agents on a film-by-film basis. Neon is distributing Orwell: 2+2=5 in North America, with Goodfellas representing international sales.

“We’re willing to spend on development, production,” said King, describing the various positions including financing and co-financing that the company will take. “We’re comfortable working with the streamers and studios where we’re the creative producer. If it makes sense to do a worldwide deal, we’ll do it.”

Hermanus approached Closer Media 18 months ago with the screenplay to his Competition selection and period gay romance starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor. “We’ve read over 400 scripts in the last few years,” said Zhang. “That was the one everybody on the team read, loved and cried over.” The entrepreneur is disciplined on budgets and worked with the South African filmmaker to “get it right to the right level”, co-financing with Film4 and Tango Entertainment ahead of a production start in New Jersey in early 2024. The film premieres on May 22. 

Closer Media co-financed Orwell: 2+2=5 with Anonymous Content and Participant. The documentary premieres on May 17 and early word in Cannes has suggested the biopic about George Orwell, the famously anti-totalitarian British author of 1984 and Animal Farm, could strike a chord during the second Donald Trump presidency, at a time when threats to democracy and the rule of law are increasingly prevalent around the world.

Zhang and King are agnostic about how their films reach audiences. “We both love going to the movies and the theatrical experience,” said King. “We think of the film festival experience as theatrical, so if you’re having a great festival run in advance and then the film has a limited theatrical before it goes out on streaming, because the best thing for that movie is [for audiences] to watch it worldwide, that’s okay.”

Zhang added: “Our desire is to show the movie in theatres, of course. Every filmmaker wants their film to be shown in theatres. We’re no different, but we’re also pragmatic.”