Cannes and AI cinema: why the WAIFF festival is putting the industry's future in question

Two positions on AI cinema have collided in Cannes: the official festival keeps such works out of its main competition, while the parallel WAIFF is already presenting them as the industry's next wave. Behind the argument over taste, a harder question quickly emerged: who will get the money, the influence and the right to define what counts as cinema at all.

Two camps in Cannes

A week before the World AI Film Festival screenings, the organizers of the main 2026 Cannes Film Festival confirmed that AI works will not compete for the Palme d'Or. Their position is blunt: an algorithm can imitate form well, but it does not live through the experience from which a genuine authorial statement is born. Against this backdrop, it is striking how quickly the alternative venue carved out its niche on the Croisette and gathered directors, technologists and investors who care less about the approval of the old school than about the right to stake a claim on a new market.

The result is an almost theatrical contrast. On one side is an institution with a long history, defending the idea of cinema as a personal, lived art. On the other is the young WAIFF festival, speaking the language of startups and big platforms: rather than debate whether the technology is acceptable, speed up its adoption. Even if the visual results are still raw, the logic of the movement is familiar from other creative industries: first skepticism, then cheap experiments, then studio money and an attempt to fold it all into the mainstream.

What WAIFF showed

The screen world of the first WAIFF looked deliberately strange and at times unsettling. The selection featured people with fish scales and seaweed, a heroine with her heart outside her body, endless armies of identically tanned men on a battlefield, Blade Runner-style dystopias and feverish dreams of the body, pain and decay. It did not look like a showcase of polished technology. Rather, audiences were shown the collective unconscious of generative video, where technical freedom still outpaces taste, editing and dramaturgy.

• Body horror and surrealism instead of the usual festival aesthetic
• Hyperrealistic faces and shadows that are often more interesting than the plot
• Animals behaving like humans, from bears on sun loungers to pigs in golf carts
• Some works bordering on copying already known characters and styles

The main complaint about most of the films was not that they were made with AI, but that they often lack an internal rhythm and an emotional center. Synthetic actors' comic timing barely works yet, and directors get carried away too easily by "perfect" skin, sharp shadows and showy detail. Still, the technology already has a practical upside: 22-year-old director Dario Cirrincione said an AI scene for his film about living with dementia cost him €500, compared with roughly €20,000 for traditional special effects.

Money versus rules

The industry sees this not as a curiosity but as a new production economy. About 5,000 AI films were submitted to WAIFF's competition, versus roughly 1,000 a year earlier, when the debut festival was held in Nice. The format already has investment from notable Hollywood names, and studios are testing a more pragmatic model: better to make several AI or hybrid projects with budgets of around $50 million than to bet everything on a single traditional $200 million film. Even Val Kilmer's posthumous AI appearance in a trailer shows that the experiment left the lab long ago.

"A wave is rising: you can stand still and let it knock you down, or you can figure out what to do with it," is how WAIFF founder

Marco Landi described the situation.

But along with the money, the most painful question returns: copyright. At the festival, a short film was spotted with characters too similar to Wallace and Gromit; the jury ultimately decided neither to screen nor to award it. The episode neatly highlighted the paradox of the moment: directors want to make production cheaper and faster, yet at the same time demand that Silicon Valley compensate others for the labor used to train the models. Some speak radically, others cautiously, but the overall conclusion is the same: without clear rules, AI cinema will face not only an aesthetic ceiling but a legal one.

What this means

AI cinema does not yet look like a convincing replacement for conventional filmmaking, and Cannes itself openly demonstrates this. But the movement already has three things that are hard to ignore: cheap production, studio attention and an ideology of inevitability. The next stage of the debate will not be about whether a neural network can produce strange shots, but about whether it can tell stories legally and in a truly gripping way.