3,000 AI Films Made It to Venice. Ten Remain.

The awards ceremony is Sunday, September 6, at the Match Point Arena on the Venice Lido — the same barrier island that hosts the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. Three thousand short films were submitted this year, from 76 countries. Ten made it. The rest went home with what most films go home with.

What makes this worth attention is who is sitting in judgment. Gabriele Salvatores won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1992 for Mediterraneo. Rob Minkoff co-directed The Lion King. Catherine Hardwicke directed Twilight. Giacomo Mineo supervised the visual effects on Oppenheimer and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Nils Hartmann produced Gomorrah and The Young Pope. Christina Lee Storm spent fifteen years at DreamWorks Animation and Netflix before becoming Head of Studio at Secret Level. These are not credulous early adopters. These are professionals whose careers were built inside the institution AI filmmaking is trying to enter.

They sat with the ten finalists of the Reply AI Film Festival and ranked them.

What the Finalists Made

The ten films span eight countries and represent the current toolkit in its full range: Runway, Kling, Veo 3, Higgsfield, Seedance, Midjourney, Nano Banana, ElevenLabs, Magnific, Suno, Dreamina. Most filmmakers combined four or five tools across different stages — script, cinematography, character aging, voice synthesis — making the selection of instrument a directorial decision in its own right. A few used only one. None of the selections defaulted to a single platform’s aesthetic.

“Centenarian Kindergarten,” made by the Chinese collective 2xLabs, is set in a 2090 where births have ceased. Four centenarians live in a sterile facility run by AI assistants enforcing compulsory happiness. They escape to reclaim their imperfections. 2xLabs used AI to render the aged skin and tissue detail that would have required expensive prosthetics or a skilled practical effects crew. That’s the actual claim of AI filmmaking as a production instrument: not that the story is original, but that the cost of realizing it has changed. A scene exists as envisioned rather than as the budget permits.

“Kev,” by UK director Mike Bennion, is an intimate portrait of a blind man, shot with Midjourney, Kling, Veo 3, and ElevenLabs. The film is what it is because the barrier between having a vision and being able to render it is no longer purely financial. “Le Drip,” by Alex Naghavi and Ezra Li, depicts Earth’s last day as animated oil paintings — dense brushstrokes in motion, paint that flows. That visual register requires either years in a studio or AI. Naghavi and Li used AI.

“The Child of the Sea,” by Spanish director Ibai Abad, is a hybrid: stop-motion tactility with AI as production assistant, using Magnific to enable a visually expansive 17th-century world that Abad, working largely alone, could not have built in that scope otherwise. “Website,” by Chinese director Jiaze Li, is the most formally ambitious of the ten — a speculative platform broadcasting impossible events from alternate worlds, a premise that embeds the AI toolchain directly in the fiction’s logic.

The selection panel evaluated creativity, production quality, and intelligence of AI deployment across the full filmmaking pipeline — not merely whether AI was present. That’s the evaluative shift the field has needed. The same question a producer asks about any tool in any budget is now being asked about AI: what did it cost, and what did it make possible that would not otherwise have been possible?

Why This Jury

Reply is an IT consulting firm. The festival is co-sponsored by Mastercard. The prize pool exceeds €30,000. These are not the conditions under which cinema’s canon is usually written. The jury’s composition is something else.

Giacomo Mineo’s work on Oppenheimer required translating real-camera footage into something beyond the frame’s native capacity — that is, precisely, what AI film tools do, scaled down to what one person can afford. Nils Hartmann produced series that redefined European prestige television. Christina Lee Storm built film and animation slates at two studios whose creative standards are well established. These are professionals who understand what a production decision costs, and when it was made well.

Filippo Rizzante, Reply’s CTO, stated in the festival’s theme announcement: “What remains central, however, is vision: the creative idea and the ability to imagine new stories and worlds.” That reads as press copy. It’s also an accurate description of why the ten finalists got there. The films that made the cut had something to say and used the tools to say it precisely. Salvatores, in the jury announcement, described the tools as capable of “further enhancing the talent, sensibility, and creative perspective of the director” when placed in service of an authentic vision. He is an Oscar-winning filmmaker making a claim about craft. His credentials are the argument.

The Tension Nobody Mentions in the Press Release

The festival awards take place the same week ArtStation made NoAI protection the default setting across all uploads, enabling Cloudflare’s bot management to block AI scrapers from the platform’s database of artists’ work. The platform’s new owners described this as putting artists first. The traditional visual arts community building walls while AI filmmakers collect festival invitations: that’s the actual state of the field this week, not a historical tension.

The industry these jurors represent has been fighting AI in legal and labor contexts for years. Copyright disputes over training data, contract negotiations over AI use in production — these are the conditions that the careers of the directors in Venice were shaped by. That doesn’t disqualify them from judging fairly. It means the tension in the room Sunday is real, and that the jury’s presence is more meaningful than an IT company’s endorsement alone would make it.

The festival’s placement requires precision. The ceremony is at the Match Point Arena at Tennis Club Venezia on the Lido — not inside the Biennale’s official program, not in competition with the films screening this week at the Venice International Film Festival. “Centenarian Kindergarten” is not competing for the Golden Lion. It’s competing against other AI films, judged by a jury convened by Reply and Mastercard for this purpose. Saying AI film “arrived at Venice” implies an institutional welcome the festival has not received from Venice itself.

The prize economics are what they are: over €30,000 distributed to a handful of winners from 3,000 entries. Most of those filmmakers put real production time in for no financial return. That is the terms of every film competition, but it’s worth stating plainly against the headline number.

What “Imaginatio Nova” Actually Names

The Latin is a little grandiose for what it points at, which is something more modest and more verifiable: the conditions under which a filmmaker can attempt something are different from what they were four years ago. A solo director in Spain can render an expansive 17th-century coastal world. A Chinese collective can age four actors without prosthetics. A Canadian filmmaker can realize a complete screenplay without cast, crew, or budget. These are not hypothetical possibilities — the ten finalists are the evidence, and they come from eight different countries.

What the festival gets right is the evaluative frame. “New imagination” is not about the tools — it’s about what becomes imaginable when the production floor changes. Ibai Abad did not conceive “The Child of the Sea” because AI made it imaginable; he conceived it because he is a director, and AI made the realization affordable. 2xLabs did not invent the premise of “Centenarian Kindergarten” because Nano Banana Pro exists; they invented it as filmmakers and found the production path. The tools followed the vision. That’s what Rizzante’s press copy is trying to say, and it’s what the finalists’ choices confirm.

Sunday the jury announces the winners. The field doesn’t wait. Three thousand filmmakers from 76 countries made something and submitted it for judgment. The judges who showed up were serious. That verdict already landed before the ceremony started.

AI-generated editorial illustration · TemperatureZero · September 4, 2026