Inside AIFF 2025: How 10 AI Films Made It to IMAX

On June 5, 2025, a line formed down Broadway outside Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. The audience had come to see ten short films — none of which were made by traditional filmmaking methods. This was the third annual AI Film Festival, organized by Runway, and it had grown from 300 submissions in its debut year to over 6,000 entries from filmmakers worldwide.

The festival represents the most visible moment in AI cinema's annual calendar. But the real story isn't the event itself — it's what the winning films reveal about where the medium is heading.

The Winners

Grand Prix: "Total Pixel Space" by Jacob Adler. A nine-minute essay film that uses generative AI imagery to explore the mathematical nature of digital images. The film's narration poses a deceptively simple question: if every possible image is just a combination of pixel values, then every image that could ever exist already exists as a number. The judges — who included directors Gaspar Noé and Harmony Korine — recognized it as the most intellectually ambitious work in the competition.

Gold: "Jailbird" by Andrew Salter. A documentary-style film following a chicken's perspective as it arrives at a human prison to participate in a rehabilitation program. Salter, a wildlife filmmaker based in Bristol, brought traditional documentary storytelling sensibilities to AI-generated imagery, creating something that felt both familiar and genuinely new.

Silver: "ONE" by Ricardo Villavicencio and Edward Saatchi. A science fiction narrative about transhumans following the path of Voyager I to a distant planet, only to find it inhabited by lost souls trying to reclaim human bodies. The film demonstrated that AI cinema can handle complex narrative premises with multiple character perspectives.

The IMAX Partnership

Two months after the Lincoln Center premiere, Runway announced a partnership with IMAX to screen the ten finalist films in large-format theaters across ten US cities. The screenings ran August 17-20 in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, Boston, Atlanta, Denver, and Washington, D.C.

This was a milestone for multiple reasons. IMAX, whose brand is built on immersive theatrical spectacle, was lending its name and venues to AI-generated content. The large-format presentation exposed any technical weaknesses in the generated footage — IMAX screens reveal detail that laptop screens conceal — and the films generally held up.

IMAX representatives acknowledged at the press conference that the partnership represented experimentation — the company was exploring what AI-generated content meant for its platform and its audience.

What the Films Reveal

The 2025 AIFF finalists share several characteristics that suggest the medium's maturation.

Mixed media is the norm, not the exception. No minimum threshold of AI content was required — only that each film include AI-generated video. Most finalists combined live-action footage, recorded audio, and AI-generated imagery in deliberate proportions. The "pure AI" film is becoming less common as filmmakers develop more sophisticated production pipelines.

Post-production matters enormously. The gap between the finalists and typical AI video posted to social media is not primarily in generation quality — it's in editing, color grading, sound design, and pacing. The winning films were made by people who understand filmmaking, not just prompting.

Story is the differentiator. With 6,000 submissions, many entries achieved comparable technical quality. What separated the ten finalists was conceptual originality and narrative coherence. The jury was evaluating films, not tech demos.

The 2026 Festival

Runway has announced an expanded scope for the 2026 AI Festival, adding categories in Design, New Media, Fashion, Advertising, and Gaming alongside Film. The festival will return to Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center with a significantly expanded prize pool.

For AI filmmakers, the AIFF remains the most prestigious competitive venue in the space. The submission deadline and guidelines are available at aif.runwayml.com.

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