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Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures Pictures has acquired China rights to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Jenjira’s Magnificent Dream,” co-founder Tian Qi has confirmed to Variety.
The Chinese art-house distributor is also
negotiating to acquire two titles from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. In June, it added Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur” and Marine Atlan’s “La Gradiva,” and in January it took Greater China rights to Rafael Manuel’s Sundance title “Filipiñana,” which Jia executive produced and which had its Asian premiere at Pingyao this week.
Named after Jia’s 2002 feature, Unknown Pleasures is run by Jia and distributor Tian, who also founded Hero Films, the distributor of Gu You’s Busan title “The First Taste of Loneliness.” The label focuses on niche international art films, and alongside festival titles, it looks for hidden gems that lack strong international sales backing.
Before the label launched, Tian’s previous company released Weerasethakul’s “Memoria” in China, where it grossed $360,000, a third of the film’s total box office. Jia and Tian say that early success gave them confidence.
Unknown Pleasures launched in 2025, with Italian director Paola Cortellesi’s “There’s Still Tomorrow,” one of Italy’s biggest box office hits of 2023. Acquired in 2024, the film screened at the Pingyao International Film Festival and opened in Chinese cinemas on March 8 for International Women’s Day. It grossed $6 million on the back of strong reviews.
Later that year, the company picked up four Cannes titles: Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” Fukada Koji’s “Love on Trial” and the restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush.”
“The founding ethos was that the world is full of wondrous movies, and among the 1.4 billion Chinese population, these films are bound to find their audience,” Tian says. He adds that not every acquisition has to turn a profit. “Once we acquire a title, we definitely aim to release it with the fastest speed.”
Jia says he and Tian agree on keeping the company’s finances stable, but the main mission remains “to distribute films we truly like. If we stand purely from a business point, we wouldn’t start this business anyways.”
He wants the company to help grow China’s art-film market.
“We operate with a long-term library strategy: these titles should remain evergreen in the coming years. By building our own catalog and taking a long-term financial view, we keep the revenue sustainable,” Jia says.
For Jia, movies “that are genuinely interesting, deserve to be shared, and people might easily pass over – those are the ones that really need to be seen in a cinema.”
“We can’t help but sigh over some films that were released online – they actually belong to cinema,” he says.
