The Astana AI Film Festival 2026 will take place in Astana in October and will become the largest international event in the field of artificial intelligence and the film industry. According to Kazinform, 8,067 AI films from 4,756 authors from 125 countries were submitted to the competition. The total running time of the works exceeded 100 000 minutes, which confirms the scale and global interest in the festival.
The application process closed in early September: 3,138 films were submitted under the theme «The Future Worth Living In», and another 4,929 were submitted to the open program. The largest number of applications came from the United States, Kazakhstan, India, China and South Korea.
Participants used more than 80 generative models, including Suno AI, Seedance 2.5, Kling, Wan 2.6, GPT Image 2, and ElevenLabs. According to the organisers, the authors spent over 4 million dollars on producing AI content.
The competition program includes 19 genres, and all works are checked for plagiarism. The prize fund is 2 million dollars: 1,750,000 dollars is allocated to the main program, 250,000 dollars to the open section, which includes nominations for best character, direction, visual language, story and concept. Additionally, 1 million dollars in investment capital is provided for promising AI teams that will be able to obtain Astana Hub resident status.
The jury included representatives from the international film industry and the technology sector: Audrey Azoulay, former General-Director of UNESCO; Ma Ping, Dean of the China Film Group's Artificial Intelligence Research Institute; Wang Hao from the Beijing Film Academy; Balaji Srinivasan, investor and former CTO of Coinbase; and representatives of BytePlus.
The festival will take place from the 1st to 3rd of October, 2026, as part of AI Month. Finalists will present their AI films on the big screen for the first time at a cinema in Astana. Panel discussions, business sessions and master classes are planned. The award ceremony will take place on the 3rd of October.
Festival co-founder Almaz Zhali noted that the creators presented full-length films, complex stories, characters, and entire universes, demonstrating the rapid development of AI cinema. AAIFF Creative Director Aizat Kusainov emphasized that strong projects should continue after the festival, which is why investment opportunities and the Astana Hub residency program are available.
The Astana AI Film Festival 2026 creates a new international platform for creators working with artificial intelligence technologies and reflects a fundamental shift in the development of the creative industry.
