AI Film Festival Judges in 2026: Who's on the Jury at Every Major Contest

Cannes' World AI Film Festival, the Reply AI Film Festival in Venice, and Paris's Artefact AI Film Festival hand judging to working directors, actors and producers — Gong Li, Gabriele Salvatores, Cédric Klapisch — who evaluate an AI film the same way any narrative-film jury evaluates craft: story, performance, the cut. The Astana AI Film Festival, the Future Vision XPRIZE and Higgsfield's Global Film Festival instead seat AI researchers, diplomats, technologists and a small cluster of veteran genre directors — a former UNESCO director-general, a Beijing Film Academy AI research dean, a five-time Oscar-winning Pixar co-founder — who evaluate what a film demonstrates about where generative filmmaking is heading. Knowing which type of jury is reading a submission should change what gets submitted to it.

Cannes' WAiFF: a jury built from mainstream French and Hollywood cinema, led by Gong Li

The World AI Film Festival, staged at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes and unaffiliated with the official Festival de Cannes, assembled its 2026 jury around Gong Li as festival president, with Claude Lelouch serving as Honorary President and Agnès Jaoui as Jury President. The working panel around them draws from French mainstream cinema and media rather than the AI industry: Thomas Bidegain, the screenwriter behind Jacques Audiard's Golden Globe-nominated Emilia Pérez; Alexia Laroche-Joubert, CEO of Banijay France, one of Europe's largest television production groups; actor and producer Julie Gayet; and director Simon Bouisson. None of the seven has a generative-AI company on their résumé. That composition is the clearest signal WAiFF sends: it wants films that would hold up as festival cinema with the AI stripped out, judged by people whose day job is evaluating exactly that, not by anyone assessing how impressive the underlying model is.

Reply AI Film Festival: an Oscar winner chairs a jury of directors and a VFX supervisor

Reply's third annual AI Film Festival put Oscar-winning Italian director Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo) in the chair, flanked by Rob Minkoff, co-director of The Lion King, and Catherine Hardwicke, who directed Twilight. The rest of the panel skews toward people who execute a film rather than critique it from outside: VFX supervisor Giacomo Mineo, whose credits include Oppenheimer and The Odyssey; producer Christina Lee Storm; and producer Nils Hartmann, known for Gomorrah and The Young Pope. The festival drew roughly 3,000 AI-made shorts submitted to its 2026 “Imaginatio Nova” theme before its June 1 deadline, and finalists premiered in Venice at an event hosted jointly by Reply and Mastercard between September 2 and 12, 2026. A jury this heavy on working directors and a below-the-line VFX supervisor is built to reward technical execution as much as concept — Mineo in particular is positioned to notice compositing seams and inconsistent lighting that a purely creative jury might miss.

Artefact AI Film Festival: a traditional director shares the chair with an AI-native filmmaker

Paris's Artefact AI Film Festival named its 2026 jury chaired by Cédric Klapisch, the French director behind L'Auberge Espagnole, alongside Bruno Patino, president of the Franco-German public broadcaster ARTE. The notable third seat went to Paul Trillo, an Emmy-winning director whose own career has been built inside generative tools rather than adjacent to them — one of the few 2026 AI-festival juries to seat a working AI-native filmmaker next to traditional industry figures rather than choosing one camp or the other. That mix matters for submitters: Artefact is explicitly trying to judge films that satisfy both a director who has never opened a generative tool and a director who works in nothing else, which in practice means a film needs a real story Klapisch would recognize and a technical execution Trillo would respect.

Astana AI Film Festival: a jury built from diplomacy and AI policy, not narrative craft

Astana's jury looks nothing like the three above. It includes Audrey Azoulay, the former Director-General of UNESCO; Ma Ping, dean of the China Film Group's Artificial Intelligence Research Institute; Wang Hao of the Beijing Film Academy; Balaji Srinivasan, an investor and the former CTO of Coinbase; and representatives from BytePlus, ByteDance's enterprise AI arm. Not one working narrative director sits on this panel. Astana's $1,000,000 prize fund drew 8,067 films from more than 4,700 filmmakers across 125 countries before its submission window closed September 7, 2026, ahead of the festival itself running October 1–3 in Kazakhstan. A jury built from a former UN cultural chief, two Chinese film-academy AI researchers and a Silicon Valley investor is not assembled to reward the best-directed short; it's assembled to reward the film that best demonstrates what generative video can now do and what that means for the film industry going forward — a materially different brief than a WAiFF or Reply entry needs to answer.

Higgsfield and the Future Vision XPRIZE: when the sponsor's mission picks the jury

Higgsfield's Global Film Festival built a jury around genre filmmaking pedigree rather than AI expertise: Edwin Catmull, the five-time Oscar winner and former president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios; Phedon Papamichael, a two-time Oscar and BAFTA-nominated cinematographer who shot Ford v Ferrari and The Trial of the Chicago 7; Alex Proyas, director of Dark City and I, Robot; and Paul W.S. Anderson, director of the Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat franchises. The $1,000,000 pool split across 14 winners closed September 14, 2026. The Future Vision XPRIZE went a different direction entirely for its $3,500,000+ prize: Astro Teller of Google X, investor Cathie Wood, Rod Roddenberry (son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry), and astronaut Anousheh Ansari, evaluating whether a submitted treatment and short genuinely advanced an optimistic vision of the future, per XPRIZE's own announcement. Both sponsors picked juries that match their brief exactly — Higgsfield wanted genre craft recognizable to visual-effects veterans, XPRIZE wanted a film that could double as an argument for AI's upside.

Alex Proyas is 2026's most in-demand director on the AI jury circuit

One name shows up on two unconnected 2026 juries: Alex Proyas. Beyond Higgsfield, Proyas chaired the judging panel at Sydney's OMNI International AI Film Festival, alongside Yan Chen, CEO of Aurora AI; Australian director Clayton Jacobson; futurist Thea-Mai Baumann, director of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art; and Professor Toby Walsh, an AI researcher and United Nations AI advisor. OMNI drew more than 3,000 entries for its July 2026 Hyperphantasia edition in Sydney, screening 13 finalists and awarding its first-ever cash prizes across Best Picture, Best Visuals, Best Score, Best Script and two new AI Performance categories. Proyas directed The Crow in 1994 and I, Robot a decade later, well before generative video existed, which is precisely the credential that keeps landing him jury seats: festivals sponsoring six- and seven-figure AI prizes consistently want a director whose visual-effects-heavy, genre-forward filmography predates AI tools by decades, as a check against rewarding films that impress mainly because they were made with AI rather than because they're good films.

Runway's jury: tech executives and distribution gatekeepers, not critics

Runway had not published a 2026 jury as of this guide's research date — its fourth annual AI Festival confirmed winning submissions would be chosen by “an esteemed panel of jurors” without naming them. Its 2025 jury is the best available signal for what that panel tends to look like: Runway co-founder and CEO Cristobal Valenzuela; Richard Kerris, NVIDIA's VP of developer relations; Emmy-winning producer Joel Kuwahara; IMAX SVP of postproduction Bruce Markoe; Tribeca Enterprises CEO Jane Rosenthal; Gotham Film and Media Institute deputy director Kia Brooks; and Lionsgate SVP of VFX Brianna Domont, among others. That's a jury of platform executives, hardware and distribution gatekeepers, and film-industry institution leaders rather than directors or critics — a panel built to spot which AI films are ready for a theatrical or distribution pipeline (IMAX, Lionsgate, Tribeca) as much as which are simply well made. If Runway follows its 2025 pattern for 2026, a submission's commercial and distribution readiness likely matters as much as its craft.

What a jury's composition tells you about how to pitch your film

The practical takeaway is simple: read the jury bios before writing a director's statement, because they show what the jury is actually scoring. A panel of working directors and producers (WAiFF, Reply, Artefact) is scoring story, performance and cut the way any narrative-film jury would — lead with craft, not with how the film was made. A panel built from AI researchers, policy figures and technologists (Astana, XPRIZE) is scoring the film as a demonstration of what generative tools can now do and what that implies — lead the statement with the specific capability the film pushes on, not just the story. A panel of studio-adjacent veterans assembled by a tool company (Higgsfield, and by pattern likely Runway) is scoring whether the film could survive in a traditional production pipeline — cite the specific craft choices, cinematography, sound design, VFX compositing, that a Papamichael or a Markoe would recognize. None of the eight festivals in this guide publish a formal weighting between story and technology, but their juries are the closest thing to one that exists, and the names are sitting in public on each festival's own site for anyone who checks before they submit.

The bottom line

Eight major 2026 AI film festivals have published named juries, and they fall into three recognizable types: filmmaker-led juries evaluating craft (WAiFF, Reply, Artefact), policy-and-research juries evaluating technological demonstration (Astana, the Future Vision XPRIZE), and studio-veteran juries evaluating production readiness (Higgsfield, and by pattern, Runway). Alex Proyas is the one name that crosses categories, sitting on both Higgsfield's and OMNI's 2026 panels, which makes him the closest thing AI film currently has to a recurring authority figure. Before finishing a director's statement for any of these festivals, or any AI festival that publishes its jury, look up every name on the panel — a five-minute search shows whether the film is being pitched to a director, a policy advisor, or a studio distribution executive, and that should change the first sentence written.