BAKU, Azerbaijan, September 14. The Astana AI
Film Festival (AAIFF 2026) has become the world’s largest
international competition dedicated to films created using
artificial intelligence, attracting 8,067 entries from 125
countries.


Kazakhstan ranked second by the number of submissions with 829
films, behind the United States with 1,395. India submitted 702
entries, followed by China with 550 and South Korea with 349. The
top ten also included the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil
and France.



Nearly 40% of the films, or 3,138 entries, explored the
festival’s central theme, The Future Worth Living In.
Another 4,929 works were submitted to the open competition, which
covers 19 genres and has no thematic restrictions.


“Just a few months ago, we were launching an international
competition, and today we have received more than 8,000 entries
from 125 countries,” said Almaz Zhali, co-founder and Chairman of
the AAIFF Board. “These are no longer isolated AI experiments. We
are seeing full-fledged films, complex stories, characters and
entire universes.”



According to AAIFF co-founder and Creative Director Aizatulla
Khussain, the idea for the festival emerged in Astana in December
2025 as the organizers anticipated rapid advances in generative
video technology.


“We can now state clearly that the Astana AI Film Festival is
the world’s largest AI film festival, both in terms of its $2
million funding and the number of submissions,” he said. “We
entered the market at the right time, just as technologies capable
of producing real films began to emerge.”








The entries undergo several stages of screening, beginning with
checks for plagiarism and low-quality AI-generated content. Films that pass the initial
review are assessed by specialists with experience in cinema and
visual storytelling. Around 150 works will reach the festival’s
senior selection team, which will choose 25 finalists.


Khussain said hundreds of submissions had produced a strong “wow
effect”, making the final selection particularly difficult. He
added that two films by Kazakh creators were already among the
preliminary frontrunners.


The festival offers a $1 million prize pool, including $750,000
for its main thematic program and $250,000 across five open
categories. A separate $1 million investment fund was established
by entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan to support promising
AI teams.


Srinivasan said that falling production costs could create new
opportunities for smaller language communities.



“You can actually have Kazakh-language content,” he said.
“Smaller language spheres can get their own movies. It won’t just
be Hollywood everywhere. If it is in Kazakh, you can reference
things that people who speak Kazakh know.”


The submitted films have a combined runtime exceeding 100,000
minutes and were created by 4,756 filmmakers using more than 80
generative models.