EXCLUSIVE: Paris-based MMM has acquired international sales rights to Tokyo-based Indian director Anshul Chauhan’s queer erotic drama Tiger.  

The acquisition sees MMM collaborate with Free Stone Productions Co., Ltd which originally acquired sales rights to the film ahead of its premiere in the Busan International Film Festival last year, where it won the Busan Vision Winner award.

Under the deal, MMM has acquired worldwide sales rights to the film, excluding Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan, where the film has already been sold.

MMM describes Tiger as a poignant and authentic exploration of queer experiences in Tokyo, which marks a significant new chapter in his filmography.

The film follows Taiga, a 35-year-old man who works at a massage parlor while navigating gay porn auditions under the pseudonym Tiger. After learning that his father is critically ill, he returns to his hometown, where he must confront the people and memories he once left behind.

As Taiga revisits his past, his search for love, acceptance, and understanding unfolds through his passion for sex, his longing for fatherhood, and his deeply human desire for emotional connection.

Based on true stories, Tiger is a deeply moving character-driven drama and personal journey that courageously highlights the search for affection beyond the protective bubbles to which many communities—not only queer ones—have often been confined or relegated.

“We are thrilled to represent this beautiful and courageous film,” said MMM. “Through its protagonist, Tiger powerfully brings to light the universal need for love, belonging, and acceptance both within and beyond familiar environments.”

With Tiger, Chauhan once again demonstrates his remarkable ability to portray intimate human experiences with honesty, sensitivity, and emotional depth.

Filmmaker Peter Jackson, a VFX visionary as much as a master storyteller, says he’s not particularly concerned about the impact of artificial intelligence tools on the future of filmmaking.

“AI used in the right way, it’s just a tool like any other tool,” Jackson said Wednesday morning at the Cannes Film Festival. “But like anything, it’s going to come down to the imagination and originality of the person, you know, feeding the instructions into the AI program.”

“Is it actually interesting? Is it funny? Is it imaginative? Has it been stitched together well to make a narrative, a story?” Jackson continued. “Some people will make really, really great films, and some people will do the exact same process, and their film will be crap — just like normal films.”

Jackson compared AI to the early stop-motion technology used to create the original King Kong and the Ray Harryhausen movies — pioneering examples of fantasy filmmaking that he famously adores — suggesting that he’s agnostic about the tools, provided the results are imaginative.

“Those were done with stop-motion by a person moving a rubber creature,” he added. “Why shouldn’t somebody on a computer using AI software be able to create their own imagery?”

Jackson brought his lovably rumpled personage to the Côte d’Azur to accept an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival’s glitzy opening ceremony Tuesday night. He took part in a wide-ranging talk session the next morning, where he discussed the making of his early splatter classics (Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead), the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, and his recent documentary projects, including The Beatles: Get Back.

Just as at Tuesday’s ceremony, the legendary Kiwi director was supported by his Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood at the talk session, with the actor sitting among a few hundred adoring fans inside Cannes’ Palais des Festivals.

Jackson gave a sweet shoutout to Wood from the stage while discussing the most high-stakes phase of his career — when he agreed to direct three big-budget fantasy films in a row at a scale of budget and technical complexity never remotely attempted by his New Zealand film industry. He recalled regularly being in a state of despair during the drive from his home to the set each morning, full of doubts about how he would tackle the day’s scenes.

“I got to say, the one thing with Elijah, beyond any of the other actors, is that I would show up on set and he would be relentlessly cheerful every single day,” Jackson said, pointing to his friend and former leading man in the audience. “He was, like, ‘Okay, let’s get this done! What are we going to do?’”

“He was always there to help me make the movie I wanted to make,” Jackson continued. “Some actors, they do sort of show up and they’ve got this whole idea of what they want to make, but Elijah just was there to collaborate, and he’s got this optimistic energy. So, no matter how down I would feel when I arrived and got out of the car, he would be there, like, ‘Hey, how’s it going!’ Having somebody there who was that insanely cheerful was very, very helpful.”

Jackson also balanced his views on AI elsewhere in his talk with a few caveats, noting that he was “not talking about AI in general, like the thing that it might destroy the world,” but just its film world applications.

“To me, it’s just a special effect,” he said. “It’s no different from any other special effect.”

“The only thing with AI that I think is absolutely critical,” he added, “is that you don’t do an AI version of an actor without their own approval.”

Jackson likened the AI licensing of identity rights to any other form of licensing involved in the conventional film industry.

“You can’t play music, a song in a film, unless you own the rights to that song. You can’t adapt a book unless you have licensed the book,” he said. “So you shouldn’t be able to show somebody’s face through an AI technique without the approval of whoever it is — either the person themselves, or if they’re dead, their estate.”

He added: “I mean, it’s pretty straightforward, really. I don’t know. I don’t see the concern about it.”

On Friday, we covered the Pentagon’s UFO file drop because a filmmaker first showed the world a spaceship in 1902 (Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon) and, ever since, Hollywood has created thousands of movies and TV shows depicting an endless array of UFOs and aliens. The entertainment industry helped invent this genre; we made it huge, we f–king own it. 

Now, suddenly, the U.S. government wants in. The Pentagon has gone from denying UFOs are a thing to dumping documents, photos and video concerning “anomalous” phenomena. The Department of Defense has promised more files to come on a “rolling” basis. This follows Donald Trump teasing “very interesting” UFO revelations, and members of Congress suggesting proof of alien life is right around the corner if only they can convince nefarious deep state bureaucrats to let them release it. 

But if the Pentagon expects to play on Hollywood’s turf, it needs to raise its game. Last week’s UFO series premiere was a major disappointment; a vague, grainy, redacted mess. There wasn’t a coherent plot, there weren’t any characters to root for and the effects were dreadful. This release would get an even lower Rotten Tomatoes score than Prime Video’s notorious, pandemic-shot War of the Worlds remake, where Ice Cube spent 90 minutes reacting to an alien invasion while on Zoom calls.

At best, those 162 files provide enough material for a season of Ancient Aliens. For the less gullible among us, we’re not impressed by watching a single pixel, looking like an escapee from an Atari 2600, float across the screen (and this was described as one of the best clips). 

Such videos were often recorded by U.S. Navy fighter jets using an AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pod. This is impressively described as “a multi-sensor electro-optical device” that includes a “high-powered (thermal/infrared) camera, a low-light television camera and a laser rangefinder.” 

But another way to describe this device — which surely cost taxpayers a fortune — is a camera that utterly sucks at being a camera. Every video looks like a 1940s TV broadcast that somebody recorded with a Super 8 camera and then left in their attic for 70 years. We’ve grown accustomed to new Jurassic Park and Star Wars movies somehow magically looking worse than they were decades ago, but even NASA footage from the first moon walk in 1969 is somehow clearer than the government UFO videos today. So let’s get Christopher Nolan to mount some Imax cameras on those F/A 18 Super Hornets and then maybe we’ll get out of bed to look at these zig-zagging blobs. 

If the government really is hiding quality video of visitors from another world, let me reassure on this point. There’s something that nobody seems to get about so-called disclosure: Our entire concept of what might happen next if the government were to confirm alien life is based on an era of government trust that no longer exists. If Trump announces aliens are real, who is going to believe him? Not Democrats. Not half of Republicans, at this point. Everything Trump has said about tariffs is wrong — nobody is believing him about aliens. The Pentagon could put out a 4K video of a massive Close Encounters-style mothership hovering over a Chick-fil-A and Americans would go, “Pfft, fake news, AI slop, distraction.”

One wonders if all this age of disclosure hype might end up actually hurting Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day more than helping. The real-life disclosure buzz out there, combined with Universal’s “we’re hiding a bunch of this movie from trailers” campaign, is getting to the point where UFO buffs are starting to think the movie is going to end with Spielberg and Barack Obama walking into Area 51 and revealing a cryogenically frozen E.T. or something.

In the meantime, documentarian Jeremy Corbell has a new documentary out this week, Sleeping Dog, touting new previously unreleased UFO videos (Blurry orbs? You bet!). And front-line disclosure advocate Rep. Tim Burchett (whose comforting aw-shucks Tennessee drawl could be used for a sleep aid app) promises last week’s file drop is “just a drop in the bucket” and that something is coming soon that will be a true “holy crap” moment.

Maybe, just maybe … it will be an orb in color.