Renowned Mexican film director and recipient of two Oscars and the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, said on Sunday that algorithms are a problem in today’s film industry because they decide what people like.

Inarritu spoke about cinematography at the ‘Masterclass’ programme, which is part of the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival on Sunday.

Inarritu said that a problem in cinematography today is “the dictatorship of algorithms in the world we are living in,” referring to streaming services which he said are managed by algorithms “designed to keep feeding the people with what we like.”

Those algorithms are “very smart” and have “more capacities to decide,” but they are “not creative,” he said.

“They don’t know what people don’t know they like,” he argued.

He explained that the result of that is people getting their particular niche, and that this is the reason why cinema is losing relevance in today’s world.

While such a system makes what is available to consumers “a lot more diverse” Inarritu said that “it’s very hard to find conversations about pieces which really touch everybody.”

Inarritu won the Best Director award for his film ‘Babel’ at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, as well as the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing. He also won three Academy Awards – Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay – for his film Birdman (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) in 2014. He won another Best Director Academy Award the year after, for his film ‘The Revenant’.

The Revenant would also go on to win the Directors Guild of America Award, making Inarritu the first person to win the award twice in a row.

Inarritu is the first Mexican to receive the awards, apart from the Best Director Academy Award. He also became the first Latin American President of the Cannes Film Festival Jury in 2019.