Higgsfield AI, led by co-founders Alex Mashrabov (@alexmashrabov) and Yerzat Dulat, announced a $1 million global competition for AI-generated short films in a thread on X on August 3rd.
https://x.com/higgsfield_ai/status/2084359051627131074 The Higgsfield Global Film Festival will award $500,000 to its first-place winner, $200,000 for second place and $100,000 for third. An audience-choice winner will receive $100,000, while 10 honorable mentions will receive $10,000 each. Higgsfield says its jury will include Academy Award winners, with judge reveals scheduled between August 3rd and August 5th. (higgsfield.ai)
Submissions open August 7th and close August 31st at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. Entrants must be at least 18 years old and hold an active Higgsfield subscription. They may work alone or in teams of up to four, with unlimited standalone entries permitted wherever the contest is legal. Each film must run for at least three minutes, with Higgsfield recommending a length of three to five minutes. Winners are expected at the end of September or in early October. (higgsfield.ai)
Mashrabov previously led generative AI at Snap and co-founded AI Factory, the computer-vision developer behind Snapchat's Cameos feature. Snap acquired AI Factory in 2020 for a price reported at about $166 million. Mashrabov and Dulat founded Higgsfield in 2023 and initially focused on mobile video creation before launching a browser-based production platform in March 2025. (techcrunch.com)
A contest built around the product
The rules make the prize pool a customer-acquisition and product-training budget. Every entrant must subscribe, create the film within Higgsfield's Cinema Studio and publish the final cut in a public post. The submission project opens on August 7th, requiring participants to construct the film inside Higgsfield rather than upload a finished project made elsewhere. (higgsfield.ai)
That structure pushes creators beyond isolated generation clips. Higgsfield is asking for complete productions with narrative continuity, editing and a minimum three-minute runtime, forcing Cinema Studio to support the harder work between a prompt and a finished film.
Higgsfield also said every submitted project's prompts and generation history will become available for the community to study after the deadline. The announcement named three Higgsfield-made projects, Hell Grind, Zephyr and Mork, whose working files will be released. The festival page schedules the Hell Grind canvas for August 4th and Zephyr for August 5th, including their prompts, image and video assets, and project canvases. (higgsfield.ai)
Publishing those workflows gives Higgsfield a reusable education library that can show new subscribers how experienced creators assemble longer films. It also gives prospective customers a closer look at where AI video tools still require manual direction, repeated generations and editing.
Higgsfield's July 25th summary of updated terms, scheduled to take effect August 27th, says creators retain ownership and commercial rights to their inputs and outputs. The same summary says user content may be used to improve Higgsfield's models, while work entered into contests is treated as public content that Higgsfield may feature. (higgsfield.ai)
Higgsfield spends for creator distribution
The festival follows a rapid expansion financed by venture capital. Higgsfield raised an $80 million Series A extension in January, bringing the round above $130 million and valuing Higgsfield at more than $1.3 billion. Accel, AI Capital Partners, GFT Ventures and seed investor Menlo Ventures participated. Reuters reported that Higgsfield's stated $200 million annualized run rate was a projection rather than recognized revenue. (prnewswire.com)
Higgsfield currently claims more than 25 million users, 850 million generations and 300 million videos on its about page. Those figures are self-reported. Higgsfield operates as a production layer across proprietary and third-party models, using its own orchestration technology to manage camera direction, character consistency and branding. Reuters identified Runway, Synthesia and OpenAI's Sora among the products competing for filmmakers, advertisers and enterprise customers. (higgsfield.ai)
The $1 million festival gives Mashrabov and Dulat a direct way to demonstrate whether that workflow can carry a coherent film for several minutes. The winning entries will also serve as Higgsfield product demonstrations, with the underlying prompts and generation histories available beside the finished work.