Astana AI Film Festival 2026 (AAIFF): Dates, Prizes, Jury and 8,067 Entries

Submissions closed on September 7 after 8,067 films from 4,756 creators in 125 countries came in, and the organizers have put $1,000,000 in competition prizes and a separate $1,000,000 production fund behind it. This page collects what the organizers and the press have confirmed as of September 20, 2026: the dates, the entry numbers, the prize table, the jury, how the finalists are chosen, and where to send a film now that this door is shut.

Dates, venue and what the three days include

AAIFF 2026 takes place from October 1 to 3 as part of AI Month, a series of AI events in Kazakhstan, according to The Astana Times' September 15 report on the organizers' briefing in Astana. The awards ceremony and the announcement of winners are on October 3. The official site lists film screenings, conversations between filmmakers and jurors, the awards ceremony and a gala dinner, and The Astana Times adds business sessions, panel discussions and master classes. DK News reports the screenings are at the Chaplin cinemas in Astana. It is the first time finalists get to show their films to an audience on a large cinema screen in the city.

These dates differ from what was announced in spring. The Astana Times' May coverage of the launch gave a submission deadline of August 15 and event dates of September 28 to October 1. The official site now says submissions closed on September 7 and the festival is October 1 to 3, and the entry period ran from May 25 to September 7 according to the ANI wire report. Any page that still shows the May dates is out of date. The site also says late entries may still be considered at the judges' discretion, which is not an invitation to plan around, since the entry window is closed.

The numbers: 8,067 films from 125 countries

The organizers reported 8,067 submissions from 4,756 unique creators in 125 countries, with a combined running time above 100,000 minutes. The split between the two competitions is lopsided toward the open side: 3,138 films answered the main theme, The Future Worth Living In, and 4,929 went into the open competition, which has no theme. The films span 19 genres. The longest is four hours and three minutes, and one project combines five separate fictional universes.

The United States sent the most films with 1,395. Kazakhstan came second with 829, then India with 702, China with 550 and South Korea with 349. The United Kingdom, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil and France also made the top ten. Among the entrants the organizers named are the AI studio The DOR Brothers, which has more than 370,000 followers, director Zack London's Gossip Goblin project, and Robert Gaudette, whose work has been shown at international festivals. Every submission goes through a plagiarism check.

Organizers estimate that entrants spent more than $4 million using over 80 generative models. The tools they said were used most were Suno AI, Seedance 2.5, Kling, Wan 2.6, GPT Image 2 and ElevenLabs. That list is worth reading closely if you are choosing a stack for your next submission: it mixes a music model, an image model and a voice model with three video generators, which matches the fact that the rules ask every team to disclose its full pipeline.

Prize money: $1 million, $2 million or $2.75 million?

The prize figures differ between outlets, and it is worth knowing why. The official site, aaiff.ai, lists $1,000,000 in competition prizes in two pools. The thematic competition pays $750,000: a $450,000 Grand Prize, $200,000 for second and $100,000 for third. The open competition pays $250,000 as five awards of $50,000 each, for Best Character, Best Direction, Best Visual, Best Story and Best Concept. On top of that the site lists a $1,000,000 production fund invested directly into promising AI productions.

The Astana Times' September 15 article says the main thematic competition will distribute $1.75 million and quotes a combined pool of $2.75 million. That does not match the organizer's own table. It looks like the $1 million production fund was counted in the thematic line as well as on its own. DK News and the Trend news agency both describe the whole package as $2 million: a $1 million prize pool plus a $1 million fund. We use the official site's numbers: $1,000,000 in prizes, of which $750,000 sits in the thematic pool, and a separate $1,000,000 fund.

The fund is capital from investor Balaji Srinivasan, a former CTO of Coinbase, per The Astana Times, and it is meant to help selected teams keep producing and to bring them into Astana Hub. DK News adds that finalists get a year of access to the DRAMAGIC platform and 60,000 credits. Neither the fund's terms nor how many teams it will back has been published, so treat it as an opportunity for finalists and not as prize money.

The jury

The official site did not list jury names when we checked it on September 20. The jury has been named in press coverage of the September briefing. DK News and the Turkmenistan state portal list Audrey Azoulay, the former UNESCO Director-General; Ma Ping, dean of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute at the China Film Group; Wang Hao of the Beijing Film Academy; investor Balaji Srinivasan; and representatives of BytePlus, ByteDance's enterprise technology arm.

The panel spans cultural policy, two Chinese film institutions, venture capital and a generative-AI vendor, so it is not a craft-only jury. Finalists are being judged by people with reach into audiences, funding and platforms, which fits a festival that pairs prizes with a production fund. Our roundup of named juries at the other big AI festivals is in the related links below.

How the 25 finalists are chosen, and what the odds were

The selection runs in stages. Hollywood.AI's festival page describes a technical and eligibility review first, then evaluation by an international commission for official selection, then an independent international jury that decides the winners. The Astana Times' May launch coverage said 25 projects would be shortlisted, 10 from the main competition and 15 from the open one. The organizers have not published the finalist list as of September 20, as far as we could find.

The arithmetic below is ours, based on the entry counts above and the 25-finalist structure. The main competition had 3,138 entries for 10 finalist places, about one in 314. The open competition had 4,929 entries for 15 places, about one in 329. Across both, 25 finalists from 8,067 films is about one in 323. Only eight awards carry money: three thematic prizes and five open awards. That is about one film in 1,000 taking a cash prize, and if the 25-finalist plan holds, 17 finalists screen without a prize check. The final count could differ from the May plan.

For a filmmaker the useful reading is that a finalist slot is itself the achievement, and the open competition was not the softer route: it drew 4,929 entries for 15 places, nearly the same odds as the themed side.

The rules as they stand now

Some of what circulated in May has changed, so here is the current rule set from aaiff.ai. Entry was free. Films had to run at least three minutes, and no maximum is stated; the earlier 10-minute cap reported in May no longer appears, which fits the four-hour film in the entry list. Generative AI must be integral to the film's creation and not only used for VFX or upscaling. All contributors must be credited and the AI models and pipeline disclosed. English subtitles are required where the film is not in English. Films submitted through YouTube needed the hashtag #SpecialForAAIFF.

The two competitions have one difference in eligibility. Thematic entries had to answer The Future Worth Living In and be made within the festival's eligibility period. Open entries could be on any subject, and the site says works shown or submitted elsewhere may also be considered. That is why films that had already played other festivals could still go into the open pool.

Our earlier submission guide for AAIFF covers the step-by-step process as it was described during the entry window. It carries an update note now pointing here, since its dates and runtime rules have been superseded.

What 8,067 entries suggest about where AI film is heading

Co-founder Aizatulla Hussein told the briefing that after reviewing thousands of entries the organizers found no single established form for AI cinema. Some filmmakers use the tools to reproduce traditional cinema, and others make work that does not look like film at all. He said national tendencies were visible: South Korean entries leaned toward noir, horror and office settings, Chinese creators more often chose animation and distinctive visual approaches, and Kazakh filmmakers returned to yurts, the steppe and robots in science fiction. He also said trends that once lasted months now change almost daily.

Two things follow for anyone planning a submission to another festival. First, the organizers say they saw full-fledged films, complex stories and entire universes and not isolated experiments, so expect the same bar from other big festivals. Second, AAIFF screened every entry for plagiarism and required a disclosure of the models and pipeline, so keep your prompts, reference images and model versions organized from the first shot.

Where to send your film if you missed AAIFF

AAIFF is closed to new entries, but 85 AI film contests were open in our database as of September 20, 2026. These are the ones with the most at stake in the next few weeks. We checked PixLight, Slamdance and the Showrunner competition against the organizer's page or announcement on September 20, and the rest come from our database.

PixLight, from PixVerse, has a $300,000 prize pool across 33 awards and closes October 9. It is free and open worldwide. The Pilot Track takes a finished three to twenty minute film or pilot made with PixVerse Canvas as the main creative platform, and the Script Track takes a feature screenplay with a short video pitch. The top awards are $100,000, $50,000 and $20,000, with twenty $5,000 pilot awards and ten $3,000 script awards. It is the largest open prize pool with a deadline this month.

Slamdance's 2027 festival takes submissions until October 6 and says films that use AI are strongly encouraged to enter its DIG category. The extended-deadline fee for shorts and DIG is $90, the festival runs February 18 to 24, 2027, and notifications go out on December 17. It is a mainstream indie festival, not an AI-only one, which suits a film you want in front of conventional programmers.

The Gossip Goblin x Showrunner Competition runs to December 15 with a $20,000 pool: $15,000 for Best Film, $2,000 for People's Choice and $1,000 each for Best Screenplay, Best Visuals and Best Performance. Films run two to twenty minutes and must be made in Showrunner Studio with the official watermark. The Astana Times credits the Gossip Goblin project to director Zack London and lists it among the AAIFF entrants. The project has a second event on our list, a GenJam at Google DeepMind in San Francisco with a $2,000 first prize and an October 10 application deadline.

If your film is a project and not a finished short, the Runway Hundred Film Fund is a rolling grant of $5,000 to $1,000,000 or more per project with decisions promised in about two weeks. If you are working on something with a social edge, the We Are Human Festival open call closes September 30 with €10,000 in prizes and free entry. The full list sorted by date is on our contests page, and the October deadlines guide below covers what else closes before Halloween.

Sources checked on September 20, 2026

The Astana Times (May 2026 launch report, and the September 15, 2026 report on the entry numbers), the official AAIFF site at aaiff.ai, DK News, the Turkmenistan state information portal, ANI News, Trend, Hollywood.AI's AAIFF page, PixVerse's PixLight announcement, Slamdance's submission page and the Showrunner Studio competition page. Deadlines, prize figures and rules change; confirm on the organizer's page before you enter.