Cannes hosts first World AI film festival amid copyright fight

TL;DR:

  • The first World AI film festival (WAIFF) ran in Cannes alongside the main film festival, which had banned AI from its Palme d’Or competition the week before.
  • Submissions jumped from 1,000 last year to 5,000, with Hollywood backing from Ron Howard, James Cameron and Matthew McConaughey, and a Val Kilmer “AI performance” trailer landing the same week.
  • For UK creative-industry readers, WAIFF is the highest-profile public test of whether AI cinema can reconcile its productivity-cost case with the copyright and consent objections of the film community.

The first World AI film festival (WAIFF) opened in Cannes this week, just as the main Cannes festival entered its 76th year having banned AI from its Palme d’Or competition on the grounds that “AI imitates very well but it will never feel deep emotions”. The Guardian reports that submissions to WAIFF rose from about 1,000 last year — when the inaugural event was held in Nice — to 5,000 this year. The festival’s slogan was “New waves of creation”.

The screenings were patchy. Among the films on show were Blade Runner-style dystopias, a 19th-century French elite jerking awkwardly to life from history-book pages, and what one festival-goer judged a sub-trend of photorealistic animals behaving like humans, including bears on sunbeds and pigs on golf carts. AI cinema’s productivity case was concrete: a poignant short by 22-year-old Swiss-Italian director Dario Cirrincione cost €500 (around £433) to make in AI; conventional special effects would have cost closer to €20,000.

A short film with lead characters reportedly resembling Aardman Animations’ Wallace and Gromit was shortlisted for an award before WAIFF organisers said its jury had noticed “a strong resemblance to an existing work” and pulled it. Director Mathieu Kassovitz, who is making his next feature with AI and is opening an AI studio in Paris, summarised both his ambition and the contradictions facing the festival in a single line: “Fuck copyright” — followed by a warning that he would sue if anyone used AI to do “stupid shit” with his 1995 film La Haine.

LA film and tech executive Joanna Popper, a WAIFF judge, said Hollywood studios were interested in making several $50 million (around £37 million) AI or hybrid films instead of one $200 million conventional film. Paramount, under owner David Ellison, has said AI will affect every aspect of its business. The same week, a trailer appeared featuring a posthumous AI-generated performance from Val Kilmer.

Looking forward

WAIFF matters less for what it screened than for what it forced the wider industry to confront in public. UK creative bodies — including Equity, the Society of Authors, and the BFI — have been lobbying government for years on AI training data and consent. WAIFF is the moment those questions stopped being abstract for film-festival audiences and Hollywood capital allocators. For UK creative companies, the share of work exposed to AI substitution — at the script, storyboard, and effects layers — is now a live commercial question, not a regulatory one. The next 12 months will test whether copyright and consent get resolved through licensing or litigation.

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