The third edition of the Reply AI Film Festival — a competitive event dedicated to shorts made using AI that runs in tandem with the Venice Film Festival — has unveiled its selection and announced its prestigious jury headed by Italian Oscar winner Gabriele Salvatores.
The 10 works, produced using new technologies and AI tools, have been selected from 3,000 submissions from 76 countries. The winner of the event will be announced on Sept. 6 at the Match Point Arena, which is set up at the Venice Tennis Club on the Lido.
Besides Salvatores, who won the 1991 international feature Oscar with “Mediterraneo” and who most recently directed 2024’s “Naples to New York,” the Reply AI jury panel comprises, among others, “The Lion King” director Rob Minkoff; “Twilight” director Catherine Hardwicke; London-based VFX supervisor Giacomo Mineo, whose credits include Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”; and veteran Hollywood executive Christina Lee Storm, a Netflix and DreamWorks alum who last year joined L.A.-based AI-native entertainment studio Secret Level as head of its new narrative studio; and Italy-based producer Nils Hartmann, who recently stepped down as EVP at Sky Studios Italy where he shepherded many renowned Italian TV series, including “Gomorrah.”
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Besides a prize for the best AI short film overall, the jury will award two special prizes dedicated to works that stand out for their social impact and experimentation: one is the AI for Good Award, promoted in collaboration with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), that will go to the short film that most effectively reflects the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The other is the Reply AI Studios Grand Prix, awarded to the project that expresses the highest levels of innovation and excellence in the use of artificial intelligence within the creative process.
The 10 selected AI shorts stood out for their ability to explore “a new phase of imagination in which human creativity and technology meet to give life to new languages and visions,” according to a statement.
They include Canadian helmer Robert Gaudett’s “A Face Only a Mother Could Love,” about a Parisian dancer whose “secluded life changes when a woman, who has been secretly observing him for years, finally decides to approach him in a park, sparking a deep connection,” says the synopsis; British director Mike Bennion’s “Kev,” an intimate exploration of the titular protagonist’s “personal experience with blindness, highlighting the people, connections and aspects of everyday life that are most important to him”; Chinese helmer Jiaze Li’s “Website,” a science fiction short that explores “a platform capable of transmitting impossible events from other worlds, where the very act of observation actively shapes reality and influences culture”; and, also from China and directed by the 2xLabs visual artists’ collective, “Centenerian Kindergarten,” set in a dystopian future in 2090 “marked by a birth rate decline.” In this setting, “four centenarians escape from a sterile facility where AI assistants enforce forced happiness, in an attempt to regain their human imperfections.”