While the actual Venice Film Festival ran its usual red carpets, a second, stranger festival was happening a short walk down the Lido: the Reply AI Film Festival, now in its third year, judging short films made entirely with generative AI. The jury wasn’t a panel of AI researchers. It included Catherine Hardwicke, the director of “Twilight,” and Rob Minkoff, who directed “The Lion King.” Ten finalists were pulled from more than 3,000 submissions, and the winner, Robert Gaudette’s “A Face Only a Mother Could Love,” was announced at an awards ceremony on the Tennis Club Venezia grounds. Working directors are now formally judging AI filmmaking as its own competitive category, on the same weekend as the festival that’s spent 83 years defining what counts as cinema.
“Everybody’s Curious,” Even the Ones Who Won’t Say So
Hardwicke didn’t frame her jury seat as a novelty. “Every single director that I’ve talked to in the last few months, some very big, Academy-nominated, big blockbuster directors, everybody’s curious about AI,” she said, adding that plenty of working directors are already using it quietly for backdrops and previsualization. That quiet part is the actual story. Mike Bennion, a UK-based AI filmmaker and one of this year’s finalists for his film “Kev,” said he’d been hired directly by a studio to test whether AI could stand in for work that would otherwise cost far more. He wouldn’t name the studio, “sworn to secrecy,” and didn’t pretend the industry was being straight about any of it: it’s “full of hypocrites who use the tech but are reluctant to say how.”
That gap between private use and public denial is exactly why a festival built around AI shorts functions differently from a marketing demo. Nobody at Reply is claiming the tech is finished. They’re watching it in competition against other AI work and deciding, out loud, what actually holds up as a short film versus what’s just a technical trick.
The Filmmaker Who Got Death Threats for Going Viral
Not every finalist got to treat this lightly. Jacopo Reale, creative director at Rome’s Labyrinth Studio and a past Reply finalist now working on a project for Sky Cinema, has talked publicly about what happened after one of his earlier AI-assisted films went viral: multiple death threats, over a short film. That’s the part of this story that a jury full of blockbuster directors doesn’t erase. Institutional legitimacy, Hardwicke’s presence, a real prize, a real ceremony, doesn’t touch the fact that AI filmmakers doing exactly this kind of work are getting genuine, targeted hostility for it, not just review-bombing or bad tweets.
The math on why studios keep circling this space anyway isn’t a mystery. Google put $75 million into A24 this year for a multiyear AI research partnership focused on storyboarding and production workflows, explicitly without taking access to A24’s content library. Martin Scorsese signed on as an advisor to Black Forest Labs, the company behind the FLUX image models, and has said he’s using it to storyboard his next film, “What Happens at Night,” for his own crew rather than for finished shots. Neither of those deals is about replacing a director’s eye. They’re about the unglamorous pre-production grind, communicating a shot to a cinematographer faster, cheaper, before a single frame is actually filmed.
A Festival Category Isn’t the Same as an Answer
A Gallup poll cited around the festival found 55% of Americans think AI-touched creative work produces worse art than human-only work. The industry response to that so far hasn’t been to prove the number wrong. It’s been to build a parallel track, a jury, a ceremony, a winner, and let AI shorts compete against each other instead of trying to convince a skeptical audience they belong next to the main competition. That’s a reasonable way to figure out what’s actually good versus what’s a novelty. It’s also a way to keep the argument contained on the Lido, a few hundred meters from the festival that isn’t ready to have it on the main stage yet.
Sources:
- Semafor — “Filmmakers Tout AI’s Use in Hollywood at the Other Film Festival in Venice”
- Variety — “Reply AI Film Festival Reveals Jury: Rob Minkoff, Catherine Hardwicke”
- The AI Journal — “‘A Face Only a Mother Could Love’ by Robert Gaudette Wins the Reply AI Film Festival 2026”
- Variety — “Google Invests $75 Million in A24 to Develop AI-Powered Filmmaking Tools”
- TechCrunch — “Martin Scorsese Becomes the Latest — and Most Unlikely — Hollywood Voice for AI”
