AI Goes to the Movies: The First World Artificial Intelligence Film Festival in Nice
April 11–12, 2025 — sunny skies, salty sea breeze, and an influx of humanoids with excellent Wi-Fi. No, this isn’t the premise of a quirky Netflix sci-fi comedy; it’s the setting of the very first World Artificial Intelligence Film Festival (WAIFF), which just took place in Nice. If Cannes is the glamorous grand dame of world cinema, then WAIFF is her eccentric, tech-savvy grandniece who just discovered Midjourney and has opinions.
Yes, AI has officially gone full cinema. It no longer just finishes your emails, translates your text messages, or listens patiently while you vent about your terrible date with that guy from Bumble who "doesn’t believe in forks." Now it also wants to make you cry, laugh, and awkwardly clap in dimly lit screening rooms.
So naturally, I flew in to witness history. Or at least the beta version of it.
AI: from sidekick to auteur
Let’s get one thing straight: AI is no longer content to just assist in filmmaking — it wants to direct, animate, edit, and maybe even host the afterparty. WAIFF boldly calls itself “the world’s first AI film festival,” and honestly, who’s going to argue?
The event itself is rooted in legit cinema heritage. One of its masterminds is Sara Lelouch, daughter of the legendary Claude Lelouch (yes, the Claude Lelouch — A Man and a Woman, 1966, iconic French kissing on the beach, etc.). Papa Lelouch didn’t just send his regards; he chaired the jury, which was a delightful cross-generational, cross-dimensional touch.
And yes, there were plenty of existential questions asked over croissants:
What is art?
Can a robot win a Palme d’Or?
Should ChatGPT have a seat on the jury or just write the acceptance speeches?
But most importantly: what kind of movies does AI actually make when left to its own devices?
The Animal Planet trend (now with more existentialism)
Let’s start with the heartwarmers. Apparently, one of AI’s core cinematic obsessions is animals — particularly fuzzy ones that either change your life, break your heart, or eat you. Sometimes all three.
Take PATCH by Ilian Blincourt, a film so sweet it might raise your glucose levels. It’s the story of a boy and his dog — a digital dog, but an emotionally convincing one. The boy loves his puppy, grows up, replaces it with a computer (ouch), has an existential meltdown, and then rediscovers the meaning of life... by finding his old dog again.
Then there’s Curly by Nicolas Prudent. The story? A hedgehog living in Central Park wants to curl its spines into luscious curls. Enter: a glamorous woman he meets at a New York supermarket who helps make that happen. This film won the Department’s Coup de Cœur award, and rightly so. It’s bizarre, beautiful, and somehow makes you believe that even hedgehogs deserve a makeover montage.
But don’t get too cozy. The AI gods giveth, and the AI gods taketh away. Enter NATASHA by Marcello Presotto. A lonely man raises a baby bear named Natasha, bonds with her, teaches her how to sit, roll over, and possibly read Camus. Then one day… she eats him. The final scene shows Natasha gnawing on his bones like they’re artisanal baguettes. Nature is healing — in the most National Geographic-meets-Freud kind of way.
Music Videos with a plot (or not)
Next up, the short-form crowd-pleasers. These AI-generated gems clock in under three minutes and mostly serve as aesthetic sketches or glorified mood boards. Think TikTok but with a bigger budget and less lip-syncing.
One standout was L'appel de la lune by Melody Bossan & Samuel Le Bihan — a gothic fever dream filled with Tim Burtonesque heroines who seem to have crawled out of a Hot Topic clearance bin and directly into your subconscious. There’s no plot, per se, but there is vibe — and in 2025, vibe is currency.
Another entry, In the beginning it was the end by Stephan Muntaner, features a woman slipping on a bar of soap by a pool. That’s it. But it’s shot with such melodramatic grandeur and philosophical undertones that you start questioning the symbolic significance of soap. Is it purity? Is it mortality? Or did AI just find slapstick comedy on YouTube and decide to make it art?
Ukrainian director Yevhen Chernyshov brought actual weight to this trend with Anomaly, which snagged the Special Jury Prize. It’s a surprisingly grounded reflection on how AI rewires our daily lives.
Directors, bears, and the future of festivals
The festival also confirmed that AI cinema is not just a novelty — it’s becoming a serious genre. Gaspar Noé (yes, Enter the Void Gaspar Noé) is already lined up to serve on the jury of the third edition of the Runway AI Film Festival, set for 2025 in both New York and Los Angeles. Imagine telling Noé that an AI-generated bear ate a man named Natasha and that you cried. Art is alive and well — and increasingly artificial.
Runway promises to feature short films made with generative AI tech — the same tools used at WAIFF — and its upcoming editions are already being touted as key battlegrounds for cinema’s future. Will AI take over? Will human filmmakers revolt? Or will we all just co-write scripts with bots and pretend it was collaborative art?
Final thoughts (or, What I told my AI Therapist afterwards)
So what did we learn in Nice? AI can tell a story — sometimes a better one than a third Marvel sequel. AI is obsessed with animals. Especially ones with feelings and occasionally fangs. The line between filmmaker and prompt engineer is getting blurrier than an Instagram filter. Humans still crave emotion, structure, and a little chaos. AI, surprisingly, is delivering. We laughed. We gasped. We questioned our reality. And some of us may have Googled “Can I copyright a screenplay written by AI?”
In the end, WAIFF was more than just a novelty fest for tech nerds and crypto bros. It was an earnest, occasionally messy, undeniably fascinating peek into cinema’s new frontier — where silicon chips dream of Oscars, and hedgehogs dream of curls.
However, with AI technologies, the main thing is not to lose our creative identity and originality. The human must remain at the center of the process. AI is a tool and an assistant — not a replacement for talent. A tool, by itself, cannot be art.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a screenplay to pitch to my toaster.
