AI film festivals and contests

Final deadline is October 7, 2026, two days after this check; notification date October 16; event November 14 to 15, 2026 at Close-Up Cinema. Awards are category titles (Best AI Film, Best AI Drama and so on); no cash prize is stated. The FilmFreeway listing carries a '10 Years Running' badge that does not fit an AI-only festival, so the listing may have been repurposed from an older festival. No winners list was found.

Deadline is October 9, 2026 at 11:59 PM Pacific. Audience-favorite voting runs October 21 to 28; winners are announced October 29, 2026 (used as event_date). No entry fee is stated, but an Epidemic Sound account is required (a free trial is offered). Any publicly available AI video tool is allowed. Last year's winners are shown on the page only as videos, so no names were recorded. The aggregator also lists a 2026 AI Holiday Film Competition from the same organiser with a December 6, 2026 deadline; that was not verified.

Runs monthly in Hollywood, so a call is nearly always open. Dates here are the current FilmFreeway cycle: earlybird deadline September 30, regular deadline October 21, notification October 27, event December 12, 2026. The listing also announces a festival date of Sunday, October 18, 2026. No cash prize is stated; there are about 50 award categories per month. Winners are from the September 12, 2026 edition as printed on the FilmFreeway listing. The organiser says it started in 2021. The organiser's own site was not read; all facts come from its FilmFreeway listing.

Deadline was extended to October 31, 2026, 23:59 UTC. Judging in early November and winner announcement in late November 2026; no exact date is published. The page promises 100% of eligible project credits back, up to 100,000 credits, for a valid Pilot Track entry. No entry fee is stated on the page (the aggregator lists it as free). tool_neutral is false because the page routes Pilot Track entries through PixVerse Canvas; the full guidelines page was not read, so check whether outside tools may be mixed in. The page calls it an annual contest but lists no earlier winners.

Winner takes all: there is one $1,000,000 prize and no runner-up money is stated. Timeline on the page: Top 10 and public voting from December 15, 2026; Top 5 announced December 25; Top 5 premiere at the Summit on January 9, 2027 and the winner is announced January 10 (the Summit runs January 8 to 10). Scoring: AI Integration 30%, Storytelling 30%, Creativity and Aesthetic 20%, Technical Execution 20%. A supplied intro must be added before the film. No entry fee is stated. Entrants keep copyright and grant a non-exclusive license. The 2026 edition was run with Google Gemini; the 2027 edition switched to Seedance. The 2026 winner was chosen from 3,500 submissions.

First edition. Timeline on the official site: entries September 17 to November 22, 2026; 265 shortlisted entries published December 10; the top 25 creators attend an in-person final review in Beijing December 16 to 18; awards ceremony in late December (no exact date). The prize tiers on the site add up to RMB 10,000,000. All winners must give the organiser exclusive screening rights until 6 months after the contest ends, and the organiser gets a 3-year right of first negotiation on the top-prize and craft-award works. Press reports add that the video must be 16:9 and at least 1920x1080; the detailed rules page was not read. The site and rules are in Chinese; whether overseas entrants are eligible was not verified. No entry fee is stated.

Theme of the third edition is '(Dis)Connection'. Calendar on the site: submissions September 2 to December 2, 2026; audience vote December 9, 2026 to January 13, 2027; jury deliberations January 2027; awards ceremony February 2027 at mk2 Bibliotheque in Paris (no exact date published). Jury presidents are Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano. A 30-second version of the winning film screens in all mk2 theaters for one week. The site says more awards are to be announced. Length limits, fee and tool rules were not found on the landing page and were not verified. Winners of earlier editions are on separate archive sites that were not read.

Event is April 6 to 7, 2027. This is the hub of a circuit the site describes as 12 editions; upcoming local dates on the home page are Buenos Aires October 30, 2026, Istanbul November 9, 2026 and London November 24, 2026, with Los Angeles 'coming soon'. Each local edition has its own entry page and deadline. The CapCut competition inside WAIFF requires significant use of CapCut tools; the other competitions are tool-neutral. English subtitles are required and unauthorized deepfakes of identifiable people are barred. Winners are from the 2026 edition, whose awards ceremony was held April 22, 2026; countries and names are as printed on the prize list (a search result for press coverage gives the feature director as Edouard Jacques). The festival began in Nice; the 2026 and 2027 finales are in Cannes.

Rolling deadlines: November 30, 2026; January 31, February 28, March 31 and April 30, 2027 (final). Notification May 5, 2027; ceremony May 30 to 31, 2027 at enTravel Cultural Complex in Gangnam. The listing says Official Selection films are not screened on site; the jury picks 10 award-winning films to screen, from directors who attend. Attending the ceremony costs $40. Fees for other categories were not recorded. No winners list was found and no independent press coverage was checked, so treat it as a small FilmFreeway-run event.

Entries are closed; the festival itself runs December 3 to 5, 2026, with selections notified October 10. The international section is non-competitive: no rankings, only an audience award voted during the festival. A search result names the Busan Cinema Center as the venue; that and the organiser's legal name were not confirmed on an official site. No link to the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) was verified.

Season 2 is announced with a sign-up form only; no opening date, deadline, year or prize is published, so those fields are empty. The aggregator shows December 31, 2026 as a deadline, which looks like a placeholder and was not used. Season 1 ran August 31 to November 18, 2025 on Devpost with $191,500 in cash and 5,507 participants; winners were announced in December 2025. The site says $300K+ in cash has been given away across all seasons since it began as Project Odyssey in 2023. Season 1 had no single grand prize film; the five winners listed are first-place films in five of the film categories, and no countries are published.

The site has published 2027 categories but no 2027 dates, fee or deadline could be verified on it. The aggregator lists a May 15, 2027 deadline; that is unverified. Whether entries are open right now is also unverified, so this is marked upcoming. The 2026 ceremony was held in London; the prize page dated it to June 2026. Winner countries are not published.