Urbanworld Festival to Accept AI-Generated Films for 30th Anniversary

As Hollywood continues to wrestle with how to reckon with AI’s omnipresence, the Urbanworld Film Festival has opted for a full-on embrace.

The New York-based festival dedicated to championing BIPOC stories — which has seen the likes of Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, Nina DaCosta and Cord Jefferson make their way through its doors since it was founded in 1997 — is marking its 30th anniversary this October with “UrbanworldAI,” a new initiative in partnership with the New School that will see Urbanworld screen AI-generated films and shorts and launch conversations and tech demos for AI tools.

Urbanworld is owned by founder and CEO Stacy Spikes, who is also the co-founder and CEO of MoviePass, the movie-ticket subscription company he took over in 2021.

The UrbanworldAI initiative will include two tracks: an “education” track that will pair filmmakers, students and creators with AI tools and practices to help navigate the technological phenomenon, and a “showcase” track that will feature the films within the competition itself. Those films will be judged less on the technological merits and more on Spikes’ “goosebump” method, which is identifying whether the films’ stories resonate.

The showcase will screen a to-be-determined number of AI shorts under 30 minutes and feature-length films over 50 minutes, and winners will be eligible for prizes. The festival, which runs Oct. 14-18, will also introduce two new categories, Anime and Vertical, to highlight both the longstanding animation style and a burgeoning industry of creator-led content tailored for phones.

The goal, Spikes told Variety in an interview last week, is to meet the industry’s resistance with curiosity, one that he said bore similarities to other industry transformations, such as those spurred by digital filmmaking or the transition from VHS to DVDs to, eventually, streaming. That, he argues, is better than the “oversimplifying” approach the industry has taken to the AI era, one he believes has unfairly regarded the technology as a “boogeyman.”

“We’ve always felt it was our responsibility for our filmmaker communities to be a place where we could bring the technology and the people using it and creating it and put them together to make sure that you’re as up to speed as anyone else,” he said. “So there’s a responsibility here, because as AI is bringing costs down, it’s going to open up more people who can make things at a level they couldn’t make, because making films is a very expensive hobby.”

The decision is a relative rarity among major film festivals. While festivals such as Cannes have banned AI films from the festival’s official lineup, casting out films like “Hell Grind” into its adjacent marketplace, Tribeca became an outlier last week when it screened the 75-minute AI-generated “Dreams of Violets.” Urbanworld’s embrace signals a continued willingness within the industry to at least entertain acknowledging AI’s impact on the industry — even if audiences ultimately reject such work.

It’s why Spikes, who has spoken openly about how he uses AI in his personal workflow and how he wants to see it democratize filmmaking, is comfortable being “open to experimentation.” “Filmmaking is a very, very expensive game, and I think there’s an advantage to opening up those worlds,” he said.

“Technology is going to move forward,” Spikes added. “I think it’s just about being a platform that is not exclusionary. The marketplace will figure itself out. If it’s not popular and people don’t like it and don’t care, and the formats are bad, and it never looks right, guess what? It’s not gonna work out, and you won’t see us showing a bunch of it. But I think you should give things a chance to be seen.”

That doesn’t mean the creative community, which has remained largely opposed to AI’s incorporation into traditional filmmaking, will necessarily accept the decision with open arms, as actors, writers and directors have splintered on AI’s benefits. Many of Urbanworld’s alums — including Coogler, DaCosta and DuVernay — declined to comment on the decision through representatives, largely due to production commitments, but Coogler and DaCosta have spoken out about the “potential threat” or “worrying” nature of AI’s potential impact.

Still, Spikes argued, Hollywood has to be prepared to engage with a technology that has seen studios strike deals to work with it, license their characters for it and the filmmakers they employ increasingly lend their star power (and some finances) to bolster AI companies’ efforts.

“Why wouldn’t you want filmmakers to be aware of tools?” Spikes said. “It would be irresponsible to say to certain communities, ‘Don’t look over here.’ … If you look at what’s coming out of India and coming out of Asia, the danger is our kids and our students and our filmmakers don’t create or don’t learn to use tools, and they get left behind.”