Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week we’re talking to Zurich Film Festival Director & Co-Owner Reta Guetg about this year’s edition, her evolution at the festival and why she and fellow co-owners want to make it Europe’s trendiest festival.
For someone who works in an industry that is constantly in flux, Zurich Film Festival Co-Owner and Festival Director Reta Guetg is resolute in her ambition for the young film event. Last year, she and ZFF CEO and Co-Owner Christian Jungen led a management buyout of the festival from newspaper publisher NZZ Group and this year the Swiss event is doubling down on a deliberately boutique identity, strengthening its relationship with Hollywood and positioning itself as a launchpad for awards contenders – all while using its industry flagship event, the Zurich Summit, to put emerging issues like AI at the center of the conversation.
“We’re not going to be an A-festival, that’s not our strategy,” Guetg tells Deadline. “We want to have the best films we can and push them to an audience, but also to the industry. We want to put them on the radar and be a relevant launchpad for awards contenders. We can be the perfect second home for a film to get visibility through a cool place like Zurich.”
The 22nd edition of ZFF kicked off on Thursday night with the European premiere of Mount Everest adventure Tenzing, starring Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe and highlights in this year’s lineup include the European premiere of Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky as well as screenings of Naomi Watts starrer The Housewife and Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut.
Further films set to screen at the 11-day event include Danny Boyle’s Ink, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan starrer Josephine and Alexander Skarsgård and Olivia Colman rom-com Wicker. Talent in attendance this year include Hiddleston, Watts, McDonagh, Julianne Moore, Richard Linklater and John Turturro, all of whom are set to be feted by the fest.
This weekend sees the return of its annual Zurich Summit, its flagship boutique industry conference that Guetg has been carefully building since she first joined ZFF in 2016. Running September 25-27, the summit is now renowned for attracting top Hollywood and international execs who descend upon the swanky Dolder Grand Hotel for the weekend to discuss current industry trends, issues and financing models. ZFF has dubbed it “the Davos of the film world” in reference to the annual World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps.
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – OCTOBER 03: Christian Jungen, Amanda Seyfried and Reta Guetg attend the “The Testament Of Ann Lee” green carpet during the 21st Zurich Film Festival at Corso Green Carpet on October 03, 2025 in Zurich, Switzerland. (Photo by Joshua Sammer/Getty Images for ZFF)
Last year, the event went viral when Tilly Norwood was introduced to the world during a Deadline-moderated panel with her creator Eline van der Velden. After reporting that a number of talent agents were circling the AI actress for representation, the story quickly sparked a global debate and firmly put Zurich at the forefront of the conversation.
“The Tilly Norwood story really showed how Zurich can be relevant,” says Guetg. “We are a platform to launch a discussion for the industry that continued to be a discussion out of Zurich. That was really memorable and I think it was a sign that somehow, after all of these years, we are at the center of these important topics and ideas. It validated all that we have built over these years.”
With wind in its sails, the Zurich Summit is ramping up its efforts this year. Attendees the 2026 event include FilmNation Entertainment CEO Glen Basner (who is receiving the annual Game Changer Award), Backrooms director Kane Parsons, AMPAS CEO Bill Kramer, CAA Media Finance Co-Heads Roeg Sutherland and Sarah Schweitzman, UTA Independent Film Group Partner and Head Rena Ronson, Mediawan Pictures CEO Elisabeth d’Arvieu and Mubi CEO Efe Cakarel. Van der Velden is also returning along with speakers from TikTok and YouTube.
Guetg, who was first in charge of building the industry strand of the fest when she started at ZFF decade ago, points to its strong relationships with Hollywood – notably CAA – who have helped bring speakers to the confab each year. “We’ve had a lot of goodwill and help from Hollywood execs and agencies to help us grow this event – they are our soft power.”
Its success, she says, is also down to its “boutique and bespoke” nature. “It’s one of the rare times, particularly in this busy fall season, where there’s less people,” says Guetg. “It’s very curated and it’s an environment where people really have time to sit down and talk to each other in different surroundings. I think this quality time makes a difference.”
First steps
Guetg’s route into the film business began in Bern in 2000 when she launched short film festival Shnit. “It grew quite quickly into a big thing in our hometown,” she says. “We built it from scratch, and our idea was to just show fun, short films in Bern. We had a very good community of really packed cinemas.”
That festival quickly grew internationally, spanning to multiple cities including Cape Town, Bangkok and Cairo, among others, and Guetg said growing it was “intuitive.”
“I learned so much by doing it and that’s really how I learned how to own my own business and be in charge of everything,” she says. “It was a super great school for me.”
After a decade, Guetg felt it was time to move on and, after some production freelancing gigs, ZFF approached her to head up the festival’s burgeoning industry section.
“Zurich had a similar history in terms that the founders just had an idea and went for it,” she says. “That felt so familiar to me. It was obviously a completely different size but this idea that nobody really waits for you and being a bit of an underdog – because Zurich did things differently to other festivals –, that felt very natural to me.”
ZFF’s next phase
It’s a pivotal time for ZFF now, which is notably entering a new chapter following a management buyout in July 2025. Guetg is one of the festival’s now five owners, alongside well-respected former artistic director Jungen (now ZFF CEO), entrepreneur and TV host Max Loong, longtime ZFF President Felix E. Müller and finance expert Marek Skreta. The move gave Guetg and her fellow owners greater control over the festival’s future after being owned by NZZ Group, publisher of Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper, for a decade.
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – SEPTEMBER 28: Reta Guetg, Tom Quinn, Christian Junger at the Zurich Summit Dinner during the 21st Zurich Film Festival at Restaurant Terrasse on September 28, 2025 in Zurich, Switzerland. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images for ZFF)
“It happened in July, almost three months before last year’s festival, so there was not much time to think about what it would really mean,” she says. “So, we had to regroup quite quickly after the festival with this new ownership and figure out where we wanted to go.”
The response so far, she says, has been energizing.
“It’s opened up a lot of motivation for all of us, including the team, festival friends or donors that support the festival – everyone liked the idea of having an independent group of people run it rather than a big corporation.”
The priority is to retain what she describes as Zurich’s DNA: an ability to move quickly, experiment and take risks without becoming weighed down by its own scale.
“We need to be so agile, and Zurich has always been quite adaptive, so it was important for us to keep the DNA of the festival.”
She is clear that the ambition is not to scale up to the size of festivals like Cannes or Toronto. Instead, much like its summit, Guetg sees value in Zurich’s comparatively intimate scale. “That’s the idea – to keep it small. We don’t want to grow it into a huge event quantity-wise, that’s not the idea at all. We’re a very guest-friendly and talent-friendly city and we’re known for being good hosts.”
ZFF has increasingly embraced its own position as a slightly unconventional European player. Guetg cites a 2022 Guardian article’s description of Zurich, which said: “If Venice and Cannes are the grandmothers of the European festival scene, ZFF is the trendy teenager.” The phrase, she says, has stuck.
“This has become our vision – to be the trendiest film festival in Europe,” Guetg says. “And I think we’re quite near this.”
She continues: “We’ve been lucky that people have been connecting us with people who are aligned with our vision of what we want Zurich to be. Looking ahead, I think it’s important that we try not to do everything, but we continue to try and get the right people. And also to continue to not be so risk averse, because that is more important than ever.”
The 22nd Zurich Film Festival runs September 24-October 4, 2026.
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BBC director-general Matt Brittin has hinted that the broadcaster is preparing to close TV and radio networks as it looks to save money and better serve audiences online.
In an interview that will air over the weekend, Brittin told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that the BBC’s ambition to save £500 million ($662M) “may well mean” that services are shut.
The former Google executive said the BBC “wouldn’t guarantee any program or any channel will exist forever. The tight financial situation means that we’re having to look at some of those decisions a bit sooner than we might like.”
Brittin’s comments follow Deadline reporting on Wednesday that the BBC is expected to announce the closure of TV and radio networks as early as next week. There is speculation about the future of BBC Three, but nothing is confirmed at this stage.
Brittin told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “We might have some channels and services where maybe 100,000 people are watching the broadcast service, but 500,000 are getting those programs on iPlayer. When’s the right time to migrate that service fully to being on demand? And part of my job is to safeguard value for money for the licence fee payer.”
He added that the BBC had to go “in different ways to reach audiences and we’re locked into yesterday’s model of how people consume content and actually the audience is always already living in tomorrow’s world.”
The BBC’s £500M target expands on a previous savings goal worth £1.5 billion. The bigger picture behind the cuts is that 94% of the UK population use the BBC every month, but fewer than 80% pay the £180 annual licence fee. The BBC is attempting to bridge this gap.
Up to 2,000 jobs are at risk under the savings strategy, while the BBC is also involved in tense negotiations with unions over employee pay rises. Unions have rejected two BBC offers, meaning the risk of industrial action is increasing.
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Once again with feeling, Insiders. Jesse Whittock at the helm this week with a roundup of the biggest news and views from the TV and film world. Off we go, and sign up to the Insider newsletter for the full experience here.
BBC Cuts Begin
BBC boss Matt Brittin
Carl Court/Getty Images
It starts now: There’s an argument that this is one of the bleakest periods in the history of the BBC. The UK broadcaster said in February it would seek £500M ($661M) in further cost savings on top of a previously announced £1.5B, and ever since there has been a drip, drip of news and rumor about where they will come from. The reality started to materialize more starkly this week. First it emerged 41 roles were going from BBC Sport before Jake revealed that major cuts to the TV and radio networks business could see the closure of a channel such as youth-skewing BBC3 as soon as next week. Deadline then revealed another 150 in the BBC’s tech division were expected to take voluntary redundancy. Collectively, the tech and sports exits could save around £17M, which barely touches the sides of overall savings required. This is an indicator of how deep things are going to go over the next few years. The broader picture is the BBC’s licence fee model, where Brits pay around £180 a year for its content and channels, which is under extreme threat. Around 94% use BBC services, but less than 80% are paying for them. This has caused a funding crisis that has become something of a lightning rod for culture wars debates over the future of the BBC. Some want the broadcaster gone completely, while for others it’s the crown jewel in British soft power around the world. Stay tuned to Deadline over coming weeks, as further cuts emerge. On top of all of this are tense conversations being held with unions over staff pay. Hate to say it, but this feels bleak.
Ali G Under Fire
Sacha Baron Cohen as Ali G
Amazon MGM Studios
“Microwaving a relic”: Ali G was once a cultural phenomenon in the UK, propelling creator Sacha Baron Cohen to Hollywood with his suburban rude boy ways. Even back then, though, there was extreme discomfort within the Black British community about the character, who Baron Cohen claims is a pastiche of young men who culturally appropriate Black culture. They saw him as laughing at them, not with them, and that view has only amplified since Ali G’s heyday in the 1990s, so it was, to say the least, a big surprise when it emerged Baron Cohen was stepping back into his sneakers and reprising the character in MGM Studios’ Ali G: Who Iz I?. There was a wave of backlash when a trailer dropped for the film last month, and a host of Black creatives have now gone on record to criticize the pic. Dane Baptiste, creator of BBC shows Sunny D and Bamous, said Baron Cohen was “microwaving a relic from a generation ago” and was a step backwards in the post-Black Lives Matter era. Bob Hearts Abishola creator Gina Yashere and Paradise City actor Curtis Walker were among others calling out the character, though Deadline managed to speak with Colton Dunn, the Superstore actor who is one of three Black writers who worked on Ali G: Who Iz I?. Dunn called Ali G “a tool to expose racists,” and denied the character itself is racist.
The Deadline Interview: Abiba Coulibaly
Abiba Coulibaly
Next month will see the end of one of the UK’s most interesting cinema projects, when the Brixton Community Cinema closes its doors for the final time. The pop-up, pay-what-you-can cinema began in south London in 2022 and grew a reputation for eclectic and thought-provoking programming, so creator Abiba Coulibaly’s announcement of the closure took people by surprise. And the reason she is ending things now? You’ll have to click through to Zac’s exclusive chat with the film programmer to find out. >>>Read The Interview
San Sebastian Report
San Sebastian International Film Festival
San Sebastian International Film Festival
Pitt stop: San Sebastián ends on Saturday with Le Faux Soir, the latest feature from Belgian filmmaker Michaël R. Roskam. High-profile visitors to the Spanish fest this year included Brad Pitt, who screened Heart of the Beast, and the veteran actor also shared some interesting thoughts about the indie film space. Check those comments out here. The festival’s Creative Investors’ Conference also returned for its fifth year. Topics discussed at the event included AI and Brazil’s current production boom. Check out our coverage of the conference here, and check back on Saturday to see who wins the festival’s top prize. This year’s San Seb is longtime festival director José Luis Rebordinos’s last in charge, as Maialen Beloki, the festival’s current deputy, will succeed him in January.
The Essentials
Susan Sarandon and Olivia Colman
Darren Tieste/Josh Telles for Deadline
🌶️ Hot One: Oscar winners Susan Sarandon and Olivia Colman have joined Paddy Considine, America Ferrera, Alex Hassell and Kit Harington in Channel 4 thriller series Army of Shadows.
🌶️ Another: Sky has found its Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander for the upcoming TV adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in the shape of David Oyelowo and Viola Prettejohn.
🔥 Fiery Third: Eagle Eye Drama has acquired the rights to The Great Dictator, Matthew Sweet’s biography of the flamboyant and eccentric late author Dame Barbara Cartland.
🤓 De Heer today: The Tokyo International Film Festival has named Australian director Rolf de Heer as president of the International Competition jury.
⛺ Fest latest: The 2026 edition of Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea International Film Festival has been cancelled, with the event postponed to the fourth quarter of 2027.
🗣️ Interview: The new boss of the UK’s influential Royal Television Society told Max the charity should shout louder about the nation’s “powerhouse” TV industry.
📦 Care package: Shaftesbury founder Christina Jennings issued an “urgent call to action” to the Canadian kids’ TV industry as she announced a significant package of financial support at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
😎 Roll out the red carpet: Tom Cruise and Digger took over London’s Leicester Square Gardens on Tuesday for the world premiere of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s dark political comedy.
🚨 Sound the alarm: France’s film and TV sectors issued an open letter decrying a proposed €47M ($53M) cut in public funds for state broadcaster France Télévisions.
🤝 Done deal: Independent Talent Group has bought into UK sport talent agency Tongue Tied Management.
💰 Another deal: Patrick Spence has taken control of AC Chapter One, completing a management buyout from Anonymous Content and UK agencies Casarotto Ramsay and United Agents.
🍿 Box office: Resident Evil rang up a massive $108.3M worldwide, the best start the franchise has ever seen.
🎥 Trail: For You Can See Everything, A24’s much-anticipated Elizabeth Holmes doc.
Photo of the Week
John Phillips/Getty Images for Netflix
Bookish – Florence Pugh was among the stars at the British Library this week as the institution unveiled a partnership with Netflix aimed at helping people discover books.
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BBC Studios has a new global distribution chief in place.
Sally Habbershaw is exiting Mediawan after less than a year to become President of Global Distribution at the BBC’s commercial arm.
Her London-based role, which is described as “newly expanded” will see her overseeing BBCS’s worldwide content sales business, reporting into Zai Bennett, BBC Studios Global Content CEO and Chief Creative Officer.
BBC Studios has been without a sales boss for most of the year, as the U.S.-based Janet Brown exited in January as part of a plan to move distribution closer to the mothership in the UK. Habbershaw takes up the post on September 28.
“Sally is one of the most accomplished and respected executives in the business and her experience across content investment, distribution, platforms and production makes her uniquely positioned to lead our global content distribution operation,” said Bennett.
“She brings a rare combination of commercial leadership, creative instincts and deep global market expertise, alongside an exceptional track record of building partnerships and delivering growth across some of the industry’s most successful content businesses. I look forward to working with her as we continue to maximise the value and reach of our outstanding content portfolio.”
Habbershaw was the subject of news this time last year in the run up to MIPCOM Cannes, when she replaced Valerie Vleeschhouwer at France’s Mediawan. She was named Chief Distribution Officer at the Adolescence producer.
“After twenty years in the US and, more recently, in France, coming home to do this work here matters to me,” said Habbershaw. “The content and the brand speak for themselves. What made the opportunity irresistible is the moment and the people.
“Zai has built a leadership team that is ambitious, thinks differently and is set on making a real impact. I’ve spent my career on the other side of the table from the BBC, so I arrive with a clear view of its strengths and of the work ahead.”
Today’s news comes after Deadline revealed last year that Habbershaw was exiting her New York-based role as Americas sales chief at All3Media International to move back to the UK. That triggered the promotion of Jennifer Askin to EVP, Americas at The Traitors distributor All3Media International, which has since been subsumed into Banijay Rights, following the merger of Banijay Entertainment and All3Media.
Fair to say it’s been a period of change for the distribution business as a whole.
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