Eight thousand and sixty-seven films went in. Twenty-five made the final. That is the funnel behind the Astana AI Film Festival, a competition for movies made with artificial intelligence, whose three-day final programme opened in Kazakhstan’s capital on 1 October.
The entries came from 125 countries, spread across 19 genres and built with more than 80 generative AI models. Together they ran past 100,000 minutes. Money is the other headline: the festival’s fund totals US$2 million. Half, US$1 million, goes to the winners and was provided by the Freedom Shapagat corporate foundation under Freedom Holding Corp., the company of Timur Turlov. The other US$1 million is investment capital for promising AI teams, put up by entrepreneur and venture investor Balaji Srinivasan, a former Coinbase chief technology officer and ex-general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. It is meant to support film production and the AI ecosystem in Kazakhstan.
Who is judging
The jury mixes film, academia and the tech industry. It includes Audrey Azoulay, the former UNESCO Director-General and former French culture minister; Ma Ping of China Film Group’s Institute of Artificial Intelligence Research; Wang Hao of the Beijing Film Academy’s animation faculty; Srinivasan himself; and Li Long, BytePlus general manager for the Middle East and Africa, India, Türkiye and CIS markets.
On screen
The opening day was a closed screening of the competition films, with work from creators in the United States, Canada, Italy, South Korea, China and Kazakhstan. One viewer told UzDaily that some films stood out for visual effects and others for an unusual approach to storytelling, but that “behind the technological solutions” there still had to be “an interesting story and emotions capable of reaching the audience.”
The public got its turn on 2 and 3 October, when the finalists’ films played at the Chaplin cinema in the MEGA Silk Way centre, with tickets sold through Kino.kz and the Freedom SuperApp. The final events sat inside AI Month and the AI & Digital Bridge 2026 conference, and winners were due to be named on 3 October.
