The AI Film Festival is branching out to include design, new media, fashion, gaming and advertising, AI firm and festival organizer Runway has announced.
In a video posted Wednesday to Instagram Reels, the company said the next annual edition of the festival, which will be held June 11 in New York and June 18 in Los Angeles, will be “bigger than ever.”
The renamed AI Festival “has evolved into an interdisciplinary celebration of creatives experimenting at the forefront of art and technology,” Runway said on the fest’s website.
Runway is among a growing cluster of well-funded start-ups making tools with filmmakers in mind. The company was founded by a trio of friends from Chile who met at New York University as graduate students focused on communications technology. Last spring, Runway raised a $308 million funding round that valued the company at $3 billion.
The 2026 event in New York will be held at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, the same venue as last year’s edition and also, notably, the home of the New York Film Festival every fall. Last year, Runway also inked a deal with Imax to have the 10 short films that were part of the festival have a commercial run in several of the company’s large-format auditoriums.
Prizes this year will continue to reflect the supremacy of film, with $15,000 in cash going to the first-place filmmaker, and $10,000 apiece going to the winner in the other categories. Winners also receive credits for Runway tools.
Jamie Umpherson, head of creative and studios at Runway, said the company is modeling its shift on a similar move made by the Tribeca Festival. “They have been able to bring a number of communities together every year,” he told Deadline in an interview. “That’s something we are also looking to continue doing.”
When this year’s fests are held on both coasts, the backdrop could be an unsettled one. Hollywood’s above-the-line unions are about to start negotiating new contracts with studios and streamers ahead of mid-year deadlines. In 2023, SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America both went on strike, in part over worries about AI jeopardizing copyrighted work and hurting workers’ job prospects. Runway and other AI companies have repeatedly asserted their belief that they are creating technology that can enhance, not replace, the creative work of filmmakers and others.
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