AI Film Festivals in Italy 2026: Rome, Turin, Florence and Venice Deadlines

Visionaria and (UN)REAL screen on the same late-November weekend, and Florence announces its winners on January 15, 2027. motion in Milan and the Burano AI Film Festival. This page lists every Italian AI festival in our database, with dates, fees and rules checked against each official page on October 10, 2026.

Open now: three Italian AI festivals and their deadlines

VISIONARIA, International Festival of AI Cinema & Creativity (Rome). Final deadline October 31, 2026, with an earlier deadline on October 12. Notifications go out November 7 and the festival runs November 27 to 29, 2026 at GAMM, the Game Museum on Via delle Terme di Diocleziano. It is a first edition. Fees are set per category on its FilmFreeway page.

(UN)REAL AI Film Festival (Turin). Deadline October 31, 2026, finalists announced November 14, festival on November 27 and 28 at Feat. House, Via Giuseppe Giacosa 15. The official site lists a fee of €50 per submitted work.

Florence AI Festival, or FAIF (Florence). The earlybird, regular and late deadlines (September 5, September 25 and October 15) have passed or are about to, and the extended deadline is December 15, 2026. Winners are announced live at Palazzo San Niccolò on January 15, 2027. One line on its FilmFreeway listing still mentions a November 22, 2026 screening, so confirm the date with the festival before you book travel.

If you have one finished film and want to enter all three, you have 21 days for the first two.

VISIONARIA: six categories, no premiere rule, no cash promised

Visionaria accepts work from filmmakers, artists, studios, students and teams in any country. Its rules say AI has to be a significant part of the creative or production process and "not merely incidental". Eligible uses include image generation, animation, visual effects, screenwriting, sound design, music, voice synthesis and editing, so a live-action film with an AI-generated score or AI-built sets can qualify if the AI use is central to the idea.

The six award categories are Best AI Film, Best AI Animation, Best AI Documentary, Best AI Music Video, Best AI Experimental Film and Best AI Short-Form Content. No premiere status is required, and films already screened, awarded or posted online can be submitted. Dialogue in any language other than English or Italian needs English subtitles, and selected films may be asked for an Italian-subtitled copy as well.

Every entry includes a short statement on how you used AI, and the festival may ask for details on tools, models and workflows. Keep that list as you work. The rules say awards carry no money unless stated otherwise, and no cash prize had been published when we checked. What you get is a screening in Rome with talks, masterclasses and installations around it.

(UN)REAL in Turin: €50 entry, six categories, features welcome

(UN)REAL is organised by Feat. Venture Studio in Turin. Unlike most AI festivals it takes feature films. Its six categories are features, short films, animation and motion, documentary, advertising, and video art or experimental work. The only runtime cap is 20 minutes for the short film category, and there is no minimum length. Each work enters one category.

You need the film as MP4, MOV or ProRes, or a private Vimeo or Drive link, English SRT subtitles with timecode, at least three high-resolution stills, and a signed release if the film uses a real person's face, voice or likeness. That last rule matters for AI work: if you cloned a voice in ElevenLabs or built a face from a reference photo of a real person, get the release before you submit.

The awards are a Grand Prix (the site also calls it Best Picture), Best of Category, Best Original Screenplay, Best Technical Achievement, Best Acting and an Audience Award, plus jury special mentions. The site does not list cash prizes. It is the only one of the three open Italian festivals that prints its fee on its own site, and €50 is high for an AI festival with no cash prize, so enter it if your film is a feature or a strong performance piece where Best Acting is in reach.

Florence AI Festival: eight genre categories and a January final

FAIF is run by VIA, Visual Innovation Awards, the organisation behind the Rome AI Festival. Its listing describes Rome as VIA's industry summit and Florence as the event built for creatives: one day of competition screenings, keynotes and a tech expo at Palazzo San Niccolò, followed by the awards.

It is split by genre rather than by format. The eight categories are Horror, Animation, Documentary, Narrative, Comedy, Music Video, Commercial, and Fantasy/Sci-Fi, which the festival calls New World and describes as a worldbuilding category for places and creatures that could not have been photographed. Films can run up to 20 minutes. The listing says which tools you used is your business, and hybrid work combining live action with AI is welcome.

A Best of Festival winner is chosen across all eight categories and gets a trophy, a Winner laurel and a featured profile on VIA channels. Each category winner gets a trophy and laurel, and the jury may give Special Mentions for Direction, Screenplay, Sound and Music, and Visual Craft. Every official selection gets a screening and a credential for the full festival day. Partner prizes such as software credits are being confirmed on a rolling basis, so check the listing again before the December 15 deadline.

Closed for 2026: Reply AI Film Festival in Venice

The Reply AI Film Festival is the biggest AI competition based in Italy, and it is free to enter. Its 2026 entry window closed on June 1, so it is the one to plan for next year. Reply, the Turin-based technology company, presented the third edition's awards on September 6, 2026 at Tennis Club Venezia on the Lido, alongside the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, with Mastercard as co-host.

According to Reply's press release, the edition drew more than 3,000 short films from 76 countries. Oscar winner Gabriele Salvatores chaired a jury that included Rob Minkoff and Catherine Hardwicke. First place went to A Face Only A Mother Could Love by Robert Gaudette of Canada, a short about a Parisian dancer with a facial disfigurement, made with Grok, Nano Banana and Seedance. Second was Le Drip by Alex Naghavi and Ezra Li (US), third was Centenarian Kindergarten by the Chinese collective 2xLabs, which also won the AI for Good Award co-presented with the International Telecommunication Union, and Website by Jiaze Li took the Reply AI Studios Grand Prix and the Community Award.

The 2026 rules, as listed in our directory, paid €8,000, €5,000 and €2,000 to the top three, took teams of up to eight, and required entrants to be 18 or older plus a PDF explaining their AI use. Reply has not announced 2027 dates. Subscribe below and we will email you when it opens.

Rome AI Festival, AI.motion and the rest of the Italian calendar

Rome AI Festival (RAIF). The third edition screened at Cinema Adriano on September 19, 2026, and the festival says it received more than 751 submissions. It is the only Italian festival we track with a Best Italian AI award, which went to Closed Waters by Sharon Ritossa. They Came When We Left by Justinas Vos won Best AI Narrative Short and El Rey de la Montaña by Stephane Benini won Best AI Animation. Its 2026 late deadline was September 10.

AI.motion (Milan). Hosted by IULM University with IULM AI Lab and the Neural Network cultural association, it ran on October 9 and 10, 2026. Its FilmFreeway rules state there is no submission fee. Categories cover short films, music videos and commercials, and the special prizes are the RAI Cinema Channel prize and the PROMPT Magazine prize. The 2026 deadline was September 10. IULM launched the festival in 2024.

Burano AI Film Festival (BAIFF). The fourth edition runs October 13 to 17, 2026 at Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, per its official site. Entries for 2026 are closed.

AI Film & Ads Awards Venice ran on the Lido in early September with six categories and a Crystal Brain trophy for fully AI-generated work. AI Film Fest Italy, a non-profit festival in its second edition, runs AI Short, AI Doc, AI Promo and AI Animate sections; its extended deadline passed on September 30.

How the Italian AI festival year is shaped

Two clusters matter. The first is late summer around Venice: Reply and AI Film & Ads Awards Venice both time their events to the Venice Film Festival, and Rome AI Festival follows in mid-September. Their deadlines fall between June and early September, so a film you want in Venice needs to be finished by late May.

The second cluster is now. Burano and AI.motion run in mid-October, and Visionaria and (UN)REAL both hold their festivals on November 27 and 28. If you are selected by both you cannot attend both in person, since Rome and Turin are more than four hours apart by high-speed train. Most Italian festivals do not require premiere status, so one film can enter every one of them.

Language rules are friendly to non-Italian speakers. Every open festival here works in English, and only BAIFF has asked for Italian subtitles in past editions, according to our records. Visionaria needs English subtitles only when the dialogue is in a third language, and (UN)REAL asks for an English SRT file regardless.

Where else to send the same film in Europe

If your film is under 314 seconds, the Artefact AI Film Festival in Paris closes December 2, 2026 with a €10,000 grand prize and no fee listed on its site. Cine Prague AI Film Festival pays a $1,000 Grand Prix for films up to 5 minutes and closes November 28. Berlin AI Film Festival takes entries until December 31, and WAIFF Cannes takes direct entries for €15 until November 15 from countries without a WAIFF regional edition.

The contest cards below link to each Italian festival in our directory. For the full continent, see our guide to AI film festivals in Europe, and subscribe at the bottom of this page for an email when new AI film contests open.