CINEMA – Astana Hosts the World’s Largest Competition for AI-Created Films

ASTANA, September 14 /ATSH-Kazinform/ – The Artificial Intelligence Film Festival in Astana (AAIFF 2026) has become the world’s largest international competition for AI-created films, attracting 8,067 applications from 125 countries.

Kazakhstan ranks second for the number of submitted films, with 829 films, after the United States of America with 1,395.

India has submitted 702 films, China 550 and South Korea 349.

The top ten also includes Great Britain, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil and France.

About 40% of the films, or 3,138 works, address the festival’s central theme, “A Future Worth Living In.”

The rest, 4,929 films, have been submitted to the competition, which includes 19 genres and has no thematic restrictions.

“Just a few months ago we launched an international competition, while today more than 8,000 applications from 125 countries have been completed,” said Almaz Zhali, co-founder and chairman of the AAIFF board.

According to him, this is no longer about isolated experiments with artificial intelligence, but about full films, with complex stories, characters and worlds created entirely with AI.

The idea for the festival was born in Astana in December 2025, at a time when organizers anticipated rapid development of generative video technology — technology that can create videos and films using artificial intelligence.

The organizers say AAIFF is currently the world’s largest artificial intelligence film festival, both in terms of $2 million in funding and the number of applications.

Films go through several selection stages.

They are first checked for plagiarism and for very low-quality AI-generated content.

Films that pass this stage are then evaluated by specialists with experience in cinematography and visual storytelling — the way a story is conveyed through images.

About 150 films will reach the final selection stage, from which 25 finalists will emerge.

The festival has a prize fund of $1 million.

Of this amount, $750,000 is for the main thematic program and $250,000 for five categories of the open competition.

In addition to the prizes, a $1 million investment fund has also been created, which aims to support promising teams developing artificial intelligence projects.

Investor Balaji Srinivasan said that lowering film production costs could create new opportunities even for communities that speak languages with smaller numbers of users.

According to him, this technology could also enable small countries to create films in their own languages, without limiting the film industry only to Hollywood productions.

In total, the combined duration of all submitted films is more than 100,000 minutes.

They were created by 4,756 filmmakers, using more than 80 generative artificial intelligence models.

Earlier, “Kazinform” reported that the Kazakh animated project “KÖLEÑKE,” produced by the creative association “Qazaqanimation,” received the Jury Special Prize at the Portland Film, Animation and Technology Festival in the United States of America.