ASTANA – The Astana AI Film Festival (AAIFF 2026) will take place from Oct. 1 to 3, bringing together AI-generated films from 125 countries and offering a combined prize and investment pool of US$2.75 million, organizers said at a briefing in Astana. Astana AI Film Festival’s briefing in Astana.
Photo credit: AAIFF. More than 8,000 films were submitted to the international competition, highlighting the rapid growth of AI-assisted filmmaking and the expanding global community around the emerging field. The festival received 8,067 submissions from 4,756 unique creators.
The total running time of the submitted works exceeded 100,000 minutes. The competition is divided into two sections. A total of 3,138 films were submitted under the festival’s main theme, The Future Worth Living In, while another 4,929 entries were submitted to the open competition without thematic restrictions.
The United States led in submissions with 1,395 films, followed by Kazakhstan with 829, India with 702, China with 550 and South Korea with 349. The United Kingdom, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil and France also ranked among the countries with the highest number of entries.
The submitted works span 19 genres, with participants using artificial intelligence not only to generate visual content but also to experiment with storytelling, genres and the creation of cinematic worlds. The longest film submitted runs for four hours and three minutes, while one project combines five separate fictional universes.
Almas Zhali, co-founder of the festival and chairman of the AAIFF board. Photo credit: AAIFF. “Just a few months ago, we were launching an international competition, and today we have received more than 8,000 works from 125 countries,” said Almas Zhali, co-founder of the festival and chairman of the AAIFF board.
“These are no longer isolated AI experiments – we are seeing full-fledged films, complex stories, characters and entire universes. This scale shows how quickly AI cinema is developing,” he said. The participants include emerging directors and independent teams alongside established figures in the international AI creative industry.
Among them are AI production studio The DOR Brothers, which has more than 370,000 followers, director Zack London’s Gossip Goblin project and Robert Gaudette, whose works have previously been presented and recognized at international film festivals. Organizers estimate that participants spent more than $4 million using more than 80 generative AI models.
Among the most widely used tools were Suno AI, Seedance 2.5, Kling, Wan 2.6, GPT Image 2 and ElevenLabs. All submitted films undergo mandatory plagiarism checks.