Buenos Aires will host the first edition of a festival built around the rapidly changing relationship between filmmaking and artificial intelligence.
Buenos Aires, Argentina
The World AI Film Festival has extended its submission deadline to October 14 as it prepares for its first Buenos Aires edition, scheduled for October 30 at the city’s Convention Center as part of TecWeek 2026.
The event will bring together filmmakers, technologists, producers and creative-industry professionals around one of the most disruptive questions facing cinema: how artificial intelligence is changing the way audiovisual stories are conceived, produced and distributed.
Six competitive categories will structure the festival: short film, feature film, animation, microseries, advertising and documentary. Selected projects will compete for inclusion in the official Buenos Aires program and may also advance toward Road to Cannes, the international pathway connecting different festival locations with a global final.
The judging structure reflects the hybrid nature of the event. The local jury includes producer and screenwriter Axel Kuschevatzky, media executive Diego Guebel, virtual production specialist Agustín Cossa, interactive-experience developer Alejandra Bruno, filmmaker Sabrina Farji and talent representative Nicolás Esmede.
An international panel adds another layer of technological and creative expertise. It includes Marco Landi, former Apple executive and president of Institut EuropIA, filmmaker Julien Raout, immersive-media producer Joanna Popper, Golden Eagle Films executive Nancy Hamilton and Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Nyko Oliver, whose work includes films created with generative AI.
The festival’s format goes beyond screenings. Organizers plan masterclasses, discussion panels and networking spaces designed to connect the film industry with artificial intelligence, virtual production and other emerging creative technologies.
That convergence is becoming increasingly important. Generative AI can now assist with storyboarding, visual development, animation, voice, editing, synthetic environments and even entire sequences. The result is not simply a faster production process but a widening debate over authorship, labor, originality and the definition of filmmaking itself.
Festivals dedicated specifically to AI-generated or AI-assisted cinema are therefore becoming experimental spaces where those questions can be tested in practice. They are not replacing traditional film festivals, but they are creating a parallel environment in which new forms of production can be judged according to artistic criteria rather than technological novelty alone.
Buenos Aires is a notable setting for that discussion. The city combines an established audiovisual tradition with a growing technology and startup ecosystem, making it a natural laboratory for the collision between cultural production and computational creativity.
The World AI Film Festival arrives at a moment when the central question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will enter cinema. It already has.
What remains unsettled is who will be recognized as the author when human imagination and machine-generated creation begin occupying the same frame.