Zurich 2026: Human-Made Cinema Becomes a Luxury Standard

At the Dolder Grand, during the 2026 Zurich Film Festival’s industry summit, MUBI founder Efe Cakarel drew a line. The company already uses artificial intelligence for finance, forecasting and customer support, but artistic production would remain on the other side of the boundary.

The declaration was welcomed because it sounded like preservation in an industry increasingly organized around automation. Yet almost every other conversation in the same hotel complicated the distinction.

The synthetic film still has a crew

Director Zack London described the people employed on his AI-driven film Gods Don’t Give Gifts: voice actors, musicians, writers, a Foley artist and a post-production team. AI generates the images because producing them through traditional effects would, by his estimate, require tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

For London, authorship is not defended by preserving every traditional production cost. It may also be defended by removing the financial barrier that prevents the film from existing in the first place.

MUBI has chosen another route to greater capacity. In 2025 it raised $100 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The language surrounding the investment paired strong creative vision with the economics of a high-growth technology platform. The money was intended for films, productions, brand development and corporate acquisitions.

Even the health of independent cinema can therefore be described through profitability, scale and expansion.

At the same summit, Zurich Film Festival president Martin Moszkowicz argued that the old model of presales, tax credits and subsidies is nearing exhaustion and that independent production will increasingly depend on private equity. CAA’s Roeg Sutherland pushed back, insisting that presales can still work with the right project, filmmaker and cast.

The disagreement did not remove the underlying issue: independence still requires someone willing to finance it.

FilmNation’s Glen Basner added another pressure. Distribution demands increasingly encourage projects packaged for home entertainment, even when that logic works against what theatrical audiences might find exciting. Taking a chance on an unknown actor can be creatively correct and financially inconvenient at the same time.

AI reduces cost. Capital finances the exception. Packaging contains risk. Authorship is trying to remain independent somewhere inside that triangle.

The human DOP and the luxury of imperfection

Cakarel’s strongest argument was not that AI will remain weak. It was the opposite. He expects synthetic content to become increasingly convincing, and believes that improvement will make demonstrably human creation more valuable.

His analogy was wine: provenance, producer, history and process become part of the value. Intention, years of work and even failure can matter because they certify how the work came into being. Imperfection itself becomes premium.

That changes the meaning of defending the human. A film made by people risks becoming a protected designation of origin: a provenance to certify, a method to narrate, an imperfection to market.

The difficult moment arrives when preserving human labor requires proving that its presence adds value to something that could technically exist without it.

This may not become the dominant model. It could instead become a distinct tier inside the same market: synthetic productions optimized for abundance alongside human-made films sold partly through scarcity, origin and process.

Cakarel’s provocation is that, in twenty years, the radical statement of a film company may be very simple: this was made by people.