“Don’t Die Now!”: In Switzerland, Filmmakers and Philosophers Search for a Way to Survive in the Age of Cinema Without Humans
On May 5 and 6, 2026, a quiet event took place in Lausanne that may well determine what cinema looks like in five years. The ECAL film school gathered directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, and science fiction writers under one roof to ask an honest question: “Are we still needed?”
The forum was given an anxious title — “Don’t Die Now!: Cinema & artificial intelligences.” This was not a vanity fair, nor a showcase of trendy neural-network filters. Rather, it was an emergency meeting of the industry’s command center, a gathering of those who have felt the ground shifting beneath their feet.Ecology, Ethics, and the Fear of Emptiness
From the very start, the organizers set a strict framework. The conversation was not about how to generate a blockbuster quickly and cheaply, but about fundamental tectonic shifts.
The first blow to the optimists was ecology. While studios dream of replacing expensive sets with a cheap prompt, ECAL highlighted the enormous carbon footprint left by the data centers used to train powerful generative models. It turns out that “virtual castles” can heat the atmosphere in a very real way.
The second block focused on ethics and copyright. This is where the temperature of the discussion ran highest. Emerging directors posed direct questions to lawyers and producers: Where is the line between algorithmic co-authorship and the theft of a living master’s style? If an AI recreates the likeness of a deceased actor for a new role, who owns that performance — the heirs, the studio, or the robot?People Who Refuse to Die
The key intrigue lay in the list of participants. These are not tech-skeptics, but the active elite of cinema.
- Philippe Lasry, head of the screenwriting department at the prestigious FEMIS school (France), spoke about the most painful subject. He diagnosed a crisis of storytelling: neural networks have learned to write “correct” scripts based on manuals of poetics, but they kill the very “strangeness” that makes us love arthouse cinema.
- Gilles Gaillard, a cinematographer with vast experience, dissected visual style. His thesis: AI strives for “average prettiness.” When an algorithm generates an image, it relies on trillions of existing pictures, removing any “mistakes” that constitute a cinematographer’s unique perspective.
- André Ourednik, a researcher and science fiction writer, cast his gaze furthest into the future. He warned of a “semantic collapse”: if the viewer stops believing in the reality of what is happening on screen (and AI can already convincingly fake everything), cinema risks losing its most crucial element — empathy.
The First Step to Salvation
The symposium in Lausanne did not limit itself to panic. It marks the official launch of a long-term research project by ECAL. Those gathered agreed on a concrete action plan:
- Trial Period: As early as autumn 2026, the school will launch three practical tests of AI tools. Filmmakers will dissect neural networks under real-world production conditions.
- Drafting the Rules: By spring 2027, ECAL plans to hold a second symposium to present the industry with a set of recommendations — a “safety manual” for working with artificial intelligence on set — based on these tests.
While Hollywood battles the Oscars and the Golden Globes for the right to nominate robots, a quiet Swiss school is tackling a deeper question: how to remain a human being behind the camera when the “create” button rests under the fingertip of a robot. The conclusion of the Lausanne meeting can be summarized briefly: cinema is not dead yet, but it may need artificial respiration very soon.