Lights, Camera, Input: Film Festival Celebrates ‘Authentic’ Emotion Generated by AI

A new kind of filmmaker is set to walk the red carpet at this year’s Venice film festival: human creators who embrace artificial intelligence in their work.

The Reply AI Film Festival is an international short-film competition that seeks to “explore new frontiers in storytelling and creative production,” according to a July 28 press release.

This year’s theme, “Generation of Emotions,” challenges filmmakers to demonstrate how AI can create “authentic and emotionally engaging” films — a skill traditionally considered uniquely human. The participants, a diverse group of filmmakers, writers, animators and AI artists from countries including Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, have showcased a range of genres from sci-fi to documentary, the release said.

Now in its second year and held during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, the AI film festival received more than 2,500 submissions from 67 countries, per the release.

The festival’s 10 finalists were chosen for their ability to explore this year’s theme. Winners will be named on Sept. 4 at the Mastercard Priceless Lounge in Hotel Excelsior on the Venice Lido.

There will be four awards, Deadline reported July 28. They include Best Use of AI in Filmmaking; the Production Excellence Award; the Lexus Visionary Award, for technological and narrative foresight; and the AI for Good Award, developed with the International Telecommunication Union and honoring stories aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Chairing the panel of judges is Gabriele Muccino, an acclaimed Italian director best known for “The Pursuit of Happyness.”

“AI is not a replacement for human creativity, but a catalyst for innovation,” Muccino said, per the press release. “It will enable filmmakers to explore new styles, genres and narratives that were previously unimaginable.”

Joining Muccino are figures from across the media, technology and creative industries, including “The Lion King” co-director Rob Minkoff.

Reply, an international group specializing in new business models enabled by AI and digital media, launched the festival in 2024 to foster experimentation in AI-driven visual storytelling, the release said. Mastercard, a longtime sponsor of the Venice film festival, is also supporting the AI event.

The finalist films span genres from sci-fi and romance to animation and documentary, per the release. They demonstrate the breadth of AI’s applications in narrative and visual design.

Here are the 10 finalists:

• “A Million Trillion Pathway” (U.S./Japan), by art collective ROHKI, follows a broken swordsman, a grieving immortal and a cosmic entity in a multi-timeline quest to stop a blood-soaked empire.
• “Carousel” (Argentina), by Andes Aloi, is a visual poem set on a subway where a man and woman imagine a love story through blended memory and fantasy, featuring AI-generated underwater scenes and diverse locations.
• “Clown” (U.K.), by Shanshan Jiang, blurs reality and performance as a clown changes her identity to meet audience expectations, combining live action with synthetic imagery.
• “Corrupt Data Clan” (France), by Eric Kervern, reimagines a forgotten hip-hop collective from 1990s Brooklyn using AI to stylize a retrospective documentary.
• “Instinct” (Portugal), by Marcello Costa Jr., explores the tension between primal instincts and modern societal norms.
• “Love at First Sight” (Italy), by Jacopo Reale, depicts a shy romance between a shepherd and a girl who silently observes him from a hill, rendered entirely with AI tools.
• “Meme, Myself and AI” (U.K.), by Private Island studio, mixes live action with synthetic visuals and audio to reflect on AI’s human-made origins and its evolving role in self-expression.
• “Not Chosen” (Chile), by Javier Marro, tells the story of a rejected stuffed toy’s search for belonging, capturing themes of abandonment and quiet resilience through animation.
• “The Cinema That Never Was” (Germany), by Mark Wachholz, uses AI to imagine films that were abandoned or never made and how they could have changed the course of cinematic history.
• “Un Reve Liquide” (Italy), by Andrea Lommatzsch, uses AI to turn conceptual ideas into rich visual narratives that would have been cost-prohibitive using traditional methods.

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