The three-day final program of the Astana AI Film Festival 2026, an international competition for films created using artificial intelligence, has begun in Astana. 25 works were selected for the final from 8067 applications received from 125 countries. The competition program includes films across 19 genres, created using more than 80 generative AI models, and the total duration of all submitted works exceeded 100 thousand minutes.
The total festival fund is $2 million. Half of the amount, $1 million, is allocated for prizes to winners and provided by the Freedom Shagapat corporate fund under Freedom Holding Corp. Another $1 million is provided as investment capital for promising teams in the field of artificial intelligence. The investor is entrepreneur and venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan, who previously served as CTO of Coinbase and worked as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
The international jury includes representatives from the film industry, academia, and technology business, including former UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay and representatives from China Film Group, Beijing Film Academy, and BytePlus. On October 1, a private screening of the competition films took place, and on October 2 and 3, the finalists' works will be shown to the general public on the big screen at the Chaplin cinema in MEGA Silk Way. The names of the winners will be announced on October 3.